On the John Ankerberg Show, the leading progressive creationist
Dr Hugh Ross debated a young-Earth, six-literal-day creationist, Dr Kent Hovind.
This was aired early October.

Before reading this article, readers might be interested to know that Ken Ham and I did a webcast (9 Nov. 2000) about this debate and the problems with Progressive
Creationism in general. Hugh Ross responded with radio broadcasts of his own (11, 18, 25 Nov.) My article Hugh Ross lays down the gauntlet!
(21 Nov. 2000) refuted several major errors in astronomy and Hebrew that Ross made in this debate and broadcast, so this should be read before this article. Since
this has already generated some responses, it would also be helpful to read my counter-response Answering some Hugh Ross supporters.

Ross doesn’t seem to like being called a ‘progressive creationist’
although that is the commonly accepted term. Here we agree with Ross—there
is nothing progressive about this! But we will continue using it as a shorthand
for belief in six long days of creation, billions of years, successive acts of creation
during those eons, a local flood, pre-Adamic non-human human-like creatures.

Before I present the key points of the debate with my comments, it would be worth
seeing the spin- doctoring about this debate by Hugh Ross.

Ross’s own analysis

From the Reasons to Believe newsletter, October 9, 2000

The cameras weren’t rolling that day, but they did roll on the set of The
John Ankerberg Show in North Carolina. With great reluctance I agreed to
a ‘friendly’ televised debate with Kent Hovind, also known as ‘Dr
Dino’. For several hours Hovind berated me as an incompetent, deceitful scholar,
a cult leader, and a heretic. I did my best to ignore the insults and stick to presenting
the Biblical case for a big bang creation event and for a long-day creation model.
The packed studio audience, mostly Hovind supporters (as was Ankerberg, initially),
began to lean in my direction. By the end of the evening, a profound shift had occurred.

This is a curious slant. The questions from the audience afterwards gave no hint
that they were swayed by Ross; rather, some were already predisposed towards him,
but others were still sceptical of his view. And it’s hard to believe that
Ankerberg was initially a Hovind supporter, since he seemed to be partisan towards
Ross right from the outset—readers can see for themselves later.

In fact, Ross is being totally disingenuous—Ankerberg had been a Ross supporter
for years before—as Ross couldn’t possibly NOT know! See
Dr David Menton’s
letter to Ankerberg (1992) outlining the disrespectful way Ankerberg
treated high-profile young-earth creationist Ph.D. scientists who had given up much
time to record programs for him, and instead substitute Ross’s errors.

And while Hovind was probably an unfortunate choice as the representative of YEC
(I suspect that this was exactly Ankerberg’s intention), he was by no means
as abusive as Ross claims.

In Ross’s radio broadcast (11 Nov.), the following dialog occurred:

Announcer (Krista Bontrager): And I want to add that John Ankerberg
does an outstanding job of moderating this discussion …

HR: That’s right.

Announcer:… clarifying Hugh’s points in a very fair
and balanced manner.

‘Clarifying’ is hardly the word—Ankerberg repeatedly went out
of his way to make points for Ross gratuitously. And I thought a ‘fair and
balanced’ moderator would have equally tried to clarify Hovind’s points,
but even Ross can’t bring himself to make such a claim, so Ross is inadvertently
revealing Ankerberg’s obvious partiality.

The Debate

Note: I haven’t presented the whole debate, first because copyright provisions
permit only ‘fair use’ for the purposes of criticism, and second because
parts of it are superfluous or repeated. I have used ellipsis (…) to indicate
an omission.

It is also a very long file, and debates by their nature don’t always lend
themselves to systematic order of topics, so I’ve provided internal hyperlinks
to headings and key topics discussed in this article in the table of contents (right):

Today on the John Ankerberg show, we invite you to listen to a debate on science
and the Bible. Our topic—are the universe and the Earth billions of years
old or just thousands of years old? Does the information in Genesis chapter one
and two agree with contemporary scientific evidence? My guests are astronomer Dr
Hugh Ross, and educator Dr Kent Hovind. We invite you to join us for this special
debate, on the John Ankerberg show.

Big Bang

Moderator (Ankerberg): We’re talking tonight with two special
guests about the topic, is the universe and the Earth, are they billions of years
old, or just thousand of years old? And are Genesis one and two compatible with
contemporary scientific evidence today? My guests are Dr Hugh Ross, who received
his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Toronto, his post-doctoral research
on quasars at Cal Tech; also Dr Kent Hovind, who received his Ph.D. in education,
writing his doctoral dissertation on the subject of creation and evolution. Guys,
we’re glad that you’re here tonight, and we’re gonna start right
off with an important question to Dr Ross, I’d like to start with you. The
Bible says, in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth. Now you believe
the scientific evidence for the Big Bang proves that this statement is true, but
you also believe that the Big Bang theory shows that the age of universe and the
Earth is billions of years old, and the scientific evidence astronomers have discovered
about the Big Bang, it perfectly fits the Biblical creation account in Genesis one
and two. Why? Talk to us.

Ross: Sure. Well, I’d like to give credit where it’s
due. You know, a lot of people think Albert Einstein and George Gamow were the ones
that discovered the Big Bang, but in truth they were upstaged by two thousand years
by Moses and David and Zechariah, Jeremiah, Isaiah.

These were a lot more than 2000 years ago—David more like 3000, and Moses
3500.

Ross: ’Cause what you see is eight times the Bible states
that the universe was transcendently created, a transcendent beginning of matter,
energy, space, and time, which is identical to the Big Bang concept of a singular
beginning. And likewise in eleven different places in the Bible it tells us that
the universe is continually experiencing ongoing expansion, you know, the stretching
out of the heavens. It’s in the qal-active participle form, this continual
stretching out.

Ross: And the third point is that you have in Romans chapter eight
that the entire creation is subject to the law of decay, and that implies that the
universe was much hotter in the past than it is now, otherwise you’re not
gonna get this progress towards decay.

This is pure eisegesis. Proper exegesis involves working out what the original author
intended to teach his intended initial readers. Would the Roman readers
have gained the impression that the universe was much hotter in the past? And the
science is wrong too—the reason the universe is decaying is that it was once
far more organised than it is now, but because of the Curse, God has withdrawn some
of His upholding power, and things are becoming less organised. Also, a uniform
hot temperature means nothing, but temperature differences mean there is
an ability to decay into a state of more uniform temperature (the ‘heat death’).

Ross: And those are the three fundamental principles of the Big
Bang theory, and so the question is not whether or not it’s a Big Bang, but
really the thing that divides us is how long has the universe been expanding. And
I can suggest seven easy tests—there are a dozen more that are more complicated—but
I think the two that are the most compelling is that stars and planets are impossible
unless the universe has been expanding for billions of years. If it’s only
thousands all you get is hydrogen gas, if it’s trillions, all you get are
black holes. Moreover, you can only get stable orbits of planets about stars and
stars about the centers of galaxies if the universe has been expanding continually
for billions of years.

What nonsense. One must wonder what sort of God Ross worships if He was unable to
make planets in stable orbits just by the power of His word. As usual, Ross presupposes
that stars and planets formed in the big bang billions of years ago, then uses this
to ‘prove’ billions of years.

Moderator: Before Kent answers here, the fact is, where is the
scientific community? Do they, are they admitting that the universe had a start?

Ross: Yes.

Moderator: Give me an example.

Ross: Well, you’ve got Stephen Hawking for example, who produced
the space-time theorem of general relativity. And that theorem is based on only
two conditions—if the universe contains mass, and a bathroom scale is usually
enough to convince most skeptics; and number two, if the dynamics of the universe
is governed by the equations of general relativity, then there must exist a cause
that brings the universe into existence independent of matter, energy, and ten space-time
dimensions.

Hovind: There’s no difference between what you’re saying
and what Carl Sagan says. That’s what I see. I see what you say as being totally
foreign to God’s Word, and I get real nervous when somebody teaches something—

Ross: Hold it—

Hovind: When somebody teaches something where we have to have a
guru to explain it. Now you have a cult.

It was comments like that that prompted Ross’s complaint that Hovind was continually
calling him a cult leader. As can be seen, it didn’t happen that often, although
Hovind should have said that it is an almost universal cultic practice effectively
to deny the key Reformation and Biblical doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture,
so requiring a cult leader to tell the followers what it means. Reasons to Believe
doesn’t have other cultic characteristics like a definite organisational structure
for its followers, adding works to salvation (e.g. baptism, speaking in tongues),
denial of the Trinity and Christ as fully God and fully man (although William Lane
Craig, a self-confessed Ross supporter, says: ‘I find his [Ross’s] attempt
to construe God as existing in hyperdimensions of time and space and to interpret
Christian doctrines in that light to be both philosophically and theologically unacceptable’).1

Ross: Well, let me underline the principal point, though—the
very existence of stars and planets means it’s been expanding for billions
of years. To support thousand of years, you’ve got to get rid of all the stars,
planets, galaxies, and moons. And as an astronomer I can tell you there really are
stars out there, there really are planets and moons. It’s not a mirage. We
live on a planet. There’s a star that supplies us with heat. That’s
all you need, it’s very simple, you don’t have to have a Ph.D. to figure
this out. If the universe expands too fast, none of the protons and neutrons will
ever—

Once again Ross is blind to the blatantly tautological reasoning here.

Moderator: How do we know how far away they are and how long it’s
been expanding?

Ross: Well, because of the new paper published just in the June
1st issue of Astrophysical Journal, I’ve got the paper
here with me,

Another Ross tactic—argument from authority. But there is no need to be intimidated
by him. Not only is science limited when dealing with the past, so can never be
a threat to the Bible, but also Ross doesn’t understand the science involved
(or at least was extremely sloppy and misleading in his explanation), as was shown
in this section of ‘Hugh Ross lays down
the gauntlet!’

…

Hovind: And thirdly, the God that I worship is able to make a full-grown
man in a full-grown garden and full-grown universe. He doesn’t need seventeen
billion years to get it put together so we can live here. He can make it right in
six days. And He’s capable of writing a book that the average person can understand.

Ross: He’s capable of doing all of that, but He’s also
capable of doing it in two nano-seconds—

Hovind: Sure.

Ross: The question would be is, what did He do?

The answer to the question is simple: what He said He did in His written Word!

Days of creation

Moderator: [re-introduces debate and debaters, and reads from Genesis
1:1–5] Now it seems to me you got a couple things here—God created
the universe, God created the Earth, it was formless and empty, God creates light—what
kind of light, was He talking about the sun or something else? God separates light
from darkness. Does scientific evidence agree with this order? What else do you
see that’s going on? Kent, you want to start us off?

Hovind: Well, sure, I think anybody with average intelligence can
read that and say, well on the first day God created the material, He created the
heaven and the Earth, and then He made light. And He chose six days to do this and
then a day of rest to establish a seven-day week for us. It’s just six normal
days, just like we have today, there’s no difference at all. And Exodus 20:11,
the only thing God ever wrote with His own finger, He wrote on a rock for Moses,
the Ten Commandments, everything else He had somebody write for Him, He wrote on
a rock with His own finger and He doesn’t stutter—He said I made everything
in six days. To me that means He made everything in six days.

Ross: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth,
that’s matter, energy, space, and time as you can easily establish by going
to seven other Bible passages. Which means there’s light in the beginning,
but it’s dark on the surface of the waters of planet Earth, because the light
of the heavens could not get through the Earth’s atmosphere to the surface
of the Earth. As it says in the first creation day, let there be light. He uses
the verb hayah, distinct from the verb bara in
Genesis 1:1.

Of course He does: hayah is the verb to be, and bara means ‘to
create’. God said ‘let there be light’, and there was light, just
by the power of His word. Did Ross expect God to say ‘Let light be created?’
Who else was around to create? Just more obfuscation, with Ross trying to give the
impression that he’s knowledgeable in Hebrew, when his published books get
singular and plural back to front, which I explain in
this section of ‘Hugh Ross lays down the gauntlet!’ and when
challenged he was unable to say even ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in Hebrew
(see this section of my Exposé of The Genesis
Question).

Ross: God creates the light in the beginning, it shows up on the
surface of the Earth on creation day one. So creation day one is not the creation
of light, it’s the appearance of light on the surface of the waters of planet
Earth, and now photosynthesis is possible on planet Earth. So Genesis 1:2, in
my opinion, is simply the statement of four initial conditions—the Earth began
dark, water over the whole face of the Earth, unfit for life and empty of life,
and now the Spirit of God begins to work and transform.

Moderator: All right, what about this word—and there was
evening, and there was morning, the first day?

Ross: Sure. You’re reading out of the King James?

Moderator: No, I’m reading this one off NIV, and—but
it is a distinct phrase that is used there, the first day.

Ross: It should say, and there is evening and there is morning,
right?

Paul Elbert is not a Hebrew scholar, he is a physicist and an adjunct prof
(i.e. part-time lecturer) of New Testament at a small college, and not even a New
Testament scholar.

Ross: … has written a piece on this very theme, and his
point is that if it was gonna be twenty-four hours, it would have to be an evening
and an evening, or a morning and a morning, the fact that it’s evening and
morning establishes that the text is not speaking of twenty-four days, but one of
the other two literal definitions of the word day, there being three. It could be
twelve hours, twenty-four hours, or a long time period. All three are literal. Paul
Elbert’s point is the structure of the evening and the morning establishes
that it is referring to something other than a twenty-four day.

This would be news to just about every Hebrew scholar who has written on this topic.
Luther and Calvin certainly didn’t think this way, and neither do commentaries
by many evangelical and liberal scholars including Archer, Waltke, Sailhamer, Hamilton,
Barr, Leupold, Wenham, Kidner, Arnold, Speiser, Young and Davis. These are all outstanding
Hebraists, yet none argue in this way. In fact most (even those who believe in billions
of years) admit that the presence of the evening and morning clauses is strong evidence
for taking the days as literal.

Moderator: Okay, let’s just stay right here for a little
bit, because both of you are Christians, both of you believe that the Bible’s
the inerrant word of God, so that it’s not making a mistake here. Kent, do
you agree that we have three options?

Hovind: List them for me and I’ll tell you if I agree.

Moderator: Well, you’ve got the—how the word yôm
is used all through Scripture. You’ve got the day of the Lord, which has got
to be more than a twenty-four hour period of time.

Hovind: Okay.

It doesn’t have an evening/morning and a number, so it’s totally irrelevant
to the specific context of Genesis 1. This wonderfully impartial moderator is committing
the exegetical fallacy of unwarranted expansion of the semantic field (see
this section of my Exposé of The
Genesis Question).

Moderator: Okay. You’ve got the fact of a twenty-four day,
and then also it’s used for just a twelve-hour period of time, like the daytime.

But the context is totally different once again, without evening/morning and number.

Hovind: I think if you gave this book
to five thousand people and said, read this, tell me what it says, all five thousand
would come back and say, this is saying He made it in six days. When you have to
have a guru to tell you what it says, you now have a cult. That’s what makes
me very nervous. I think—let me read what James Barr says, he’s a professor
of Hebrew, or was, at Vanderbilt University, former Regius Professor of Hebrew at
Oxford University, he said,

Probably so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew of Old Testament at any
world-class university who does not believe that the writers of Genesis 1–11
intended to convey to their readers the idea that the creation took place in a series
of six days, which were the same as the days of twenty-four hours we now experience.
Or to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which suppose the days of creation
to be long eras of time, the figure of years not to be not chronological, and the
Flood to be merely a local, Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by such
professors, as far as I know.

Ross: That’s simply not true, it wasn’t true when James
Barr stated it, and it’s certainly not true today. Now I speak on seminary
campuses all the time, and the majority uphold the idea that the text, the plain
reading of the text indeed implies long periods of time, not twenty-four hours.
I mean, I’m testimony to that. I didn’t meet Christians till I was 27.
When I read the Bible for the first time, it was obvious to me it’s speaking
about six long time periods. There’s no closure on the seventh day, you’ve
only got an evening and morning for the first six days.

Previously, the systematic theologian, Dr Douglas Kelly, had responded to the same
argument from Ross as follows:2

DK: To say the least, this places a great deal of theological weight
on a very narrow and thin exegetical bridge! Is it not more concordant with the
patent sense of the context of Genesis 2 (and Exodus 20) to infer that because the
Sabbath differed in quality (though not—from anything we can learn out of
the text itself—in quantity), a slightly different concluding formula was
appended to indicate a qualitative difference (six days involved work; one day involved
rest)? The formula employed to show the termination of that first sabbath: ‘And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had
made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made’
(Gen. 2:2) seems just as definite as that of ‘and the
evening and the morning were the first day’.

Ross: You read Genesis chapter two, and look at everything that
happens on the sixth day. There are ten creation accounts in the Bible. In order
to develop a correct interpretation of creation, one must faithfully integrate all
ten, not just focus on a couple of verses out of Genesis chapter one.

Moderator: Let me give you a little hint here,

How nice of this epitome of impartiality to help Ross out here. How on Earth can
Ross claim that Ankerberg was originally a Hovind supporter?

Moderator: Dr Gleason Archer was my Hebrew
professor,

A man, indeed a defender of Biblical inerrancy, who allowed himself to be intimidated
by ‘science’ so didn’t believe what he admitted was the most obvious
interpretation—24-hour days. Archer writes:3

GA: From a superficial reading, the impression received is that
the entire creative process took place in six twenty-four hour days. If this is
was the true intent of the Hebrew author (a questionable deduction, as will be presently
shown), this seems to run counter to modern scientific research, which indicates
that the planet Earth was created several billion years ago.

The rest of this is a rationalization to explain away the clear Biblical teaching
of six 24-hour days, to fit in with uniformitarian ‘science’.

Moderator: and if we go to the next chapter,
there’s a tip-off I think in terms of what it is,
Genesis 2:4, referring back to the seven days, says, this is the account
of the heavens and the Earth when they were created, referring back to those seven
days. And then it says, in the day that the Lord God made heaven and Earth. So you
have one day referring to all seven, so you have it as a period of time. Now Gleason
Archer writes about this, all Biblical scholars admit that yôm, day, may be
used in a figurative or symbolic manner as well as in a literal sense, and he says
this is very evident in
Genesis 2:4—this is the account of the heavens and the Earth when
they were created.

Here, yôm is prefixed by be— beyôm—so
it is an idiomatic expression for ‘when’ as the NIV has it. The context
is totally different from Genesis 1, where there are no prepositions with yôm.

Moderator: Henry Morris, of all folks, says the King James version
translates the word yômas a period of time 65 times.

Yes, of course—Ankerberg makes it sound like this is Earth-shattering news
to creationists. Why give the impression that creationists have ever said that yôm
only means a 24-hour day? We just claim that it means a 24-hour day (or a part of
this cycle) when it has an evening/morning or a number.

Moderator: So the door is open, and it’s very interesting
that even Moses himself is quoted in
2 Peter 3:10 this way—but the day of the Lord will come like a thief
in the night. Actually, it’s uh—but do not let this one fact escape
your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and he’s
quoting that from, I think it’s
Psalm chapter 90 verse 4, which is a Psalm of Moses, and that’s how
Moses, who wrote this passage, used it. I’m simply saying that there’s
exegetical grounds for opening the door for a stage or a period of time among the
scholars.

Not at all.2
Peter 3:8 says that one day is as a thousand years, so
it’s a figure of speech called a simile to teach that God is outside
of time, because He is the Creator of time. It is not defining a day because it
doesn’t say ‘a day is a thousand years’. In fact,
the figure of speech is so effective in its intended aim precisely because the day
is literal and contrasts so vividly with 1000 years—to the Creator
of time, a short period of time and a long period of time may as well be the same.
So we humans should be patient with God as He will fulfil His promises in His time.

Also, Ankerberg didn’t quote
Psalm 90:4 in full, because it clinches what I say about the contrast between
a short and long time period: For a thousand years in your sight are like a day
that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. This is synonymous
parallelism, so to be consistent, Ankerberg would have to say that a watch in the
night can sometimes mean 1000 years. It’s a little difficult to imagine that
a Psalm writer (Ps
63:7) was thinking on his bed for thousands of years or that his eyes stay
open for thousands of years (Ps
119:148).

Ross: Yeah, Gleason Archer also made the point that on the sixth
day you’ve got Adam and Eve both created, Genesis chapter one, when you go
to Genesis chapter two, Adam hangs around a long time before Eve gets created. He’s
got to work the Garden of Eden, he’s got to name all the animals, he goes
through an operation, he recovers, and frankly I think what’s going on is
God’s dealing with him because men have a hard time integrating the physical
creation, the emotional creation, the spiritual. He says Eve doesn’t need
this college class, but Adam does. I think it took him at least a semester to get
through it.

Moderator: Well, the fact is, is uh—for folks who don’t
know Gleason Archer, Gleason Archer has taught most of your Hebrew scholars, he
graduated from Harvard with his Ph.D. I think he knows like 22 different languages,
he used to take notes in Hittite when he was in class. I used to quote from the
lexicon and he said that’s wrong, he would correct the lexicon. I never knew
anybody that corrected the dictionary, he’d write a letter and they would
correct it. He got my attention, and so if he’s open to the idea, I’m
open to the idea, but the fact is, is regardless, let’s go on here in terms
of the order. What happened on day two?

No-one is disputing Archer’s expertise in Hebrew, but Ankerberg overlooks
the reason Archer felt compelled to interpret Genesis the way he did. Archer was
trying to defend Biblical inerrancy against charges that it contradicted uniformitarian
‘dates’, but he should have questioned the inerrancy of the ‘dates’
rather than re-interpreted Scripture.

Hovind: I didn’t get to respond to that one.

Moderator: Oh, please, go ahead.

Hovind: I would disagree very strongly with what Dr Ross has said.

Moderator: Yes.

Hovind: I think the days have to be six normal days because there’s
so many other references in Scripture. For instance,
Exodus 20:11, in the Ten Commandments. God said, I want you to rest on the
Sabbath because I made everything in six days. He wasn’t telling them to work
six million years and then finally take a break, and the only two references you
referred to about
2 Peter 3:8 and
Psalm 90 verse 4, both of them say a day is like a thousand years, they
don’t say a million or a billion.

Hovind: Plus I think if you just read the first chapter, you’ll
see God made the plants, the grass, and the trees on day 3, He made the sun on day
4, and the Bible says clearly He created the sun. He didn’t just make the
light visible. I don’t know where Dr Ross gets this idea that the smoke cleared
and all of a sudden they could—the sun was already there. That’s just
simply not true. He created the sun—

Ross: Hold on, you’re wrong—

Hovind: Let me finish now. The Hebrew word is very clear there.
The six days of—I mean, how long can the plants live without the sun? Plus
the insects are made on day five, and they pollinate the plants. Plus animals breathe
in oxygen and breathe off carbon dioxide, and plants do the opposite. The idea of
these days being long periods of time is just ridiculous.

Moderator: Well, let me just say this—the sun wasn’t
created on day one?

Hovind: The light was made, it doesn’t say the sun was made.

Moderator: Okay, I just wanted to make sure you were saying that.

Hovind: Oh, yeah. God is light.

Moderator: Do you think the sun was created then?

Ross: Definitely. The fourth day does not say the sun was created.
It uses the verb again hayah, let there be the great lights.

Another smoke screen with hayah.

Ross: In the sixteenth verse where it
says so God made the sun, moon, and stars, it’s in the qal-perfect
form, it simply states the sun and stars were made at some unspecified time in the
past. Moreover, not—

Ross: —can the plants survive twenty-four hours. They’re
not gonna make it even a nanosecond without the heat and light of the sun. So obviously
there’s something wrong with your interpretation.

They could survive in the light God created on the first day (it’s
reasonable to assume that other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum were created
then too, e.g. infrared (heat) rays. But surviving for billions of years in a dense
haze where sunlight was blocked out, that’s another matter.

Hovind: What I’ve seen from reading your work, and I’ve
probably got—I’ve got an awful lot of letters from people who said,
boy I wish I could be there to debate Hugh Ross, you know. I got a lot of people
who would like—there’s a, many websites devoted to this topic, you know,
of your appearance of knowing Hebrew, when you don’t know any Hebrew.

Ross: I know a whole stable of Hebrew scholars that volunteer for
Reasons to Believe, okay?

They obviously didn’t bother to tell Ross the difference between singular
and plural, perfect and imperfect, or how to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’!

Hovind: Well, so do I, and I can read too, sure, and I can talk
to people who read Hebrew also, but I don’t want you to, you know, mislead
the audience into thinking you know Hebrew when you don’t, and neither do
I. All I can do—but I don’t think God writes a book where we have to
know Hebrew. The God that I worship is able to write a book and then preserve and
give it to us in a form that I can read and understand, and I’m telling you,
nobody—if you went to a mission field where there were no Christian, and no
concept of Christianity, and just gave this book to them and said, what does it
say? All of them would come back and say, it says six days just like we have today.

Ross: Kent, I’ve been on the mission field, that’s
not simply true. I mean, I’ve met all kinds of people who’ve drawn the
conclusion these are long periods of time.

Hovind: Please name one.

Ross: Okay—I mean, there’s some ladies that work with
us in our office, raised in Arkansas, read the Bible on their own, came to that
conclusion, high school education. These are plain folk.

Hovind: Well, there you had the key right there. If they’ve
got a high school education in the public school, they would have been taught evolution,
and then they would have read the Bible with—

Ross: I’m talking eleven years of age, this is before they
hit the high school years.

Ross is ignoring that modern civilisation indoctrinates children from very young
ages with literary and media references to evolution and that children in government
schools are taught evolution progressively from the earliest grades.

Hovind: Well, and when I read your testimony also in your book
about how you came to the Bible, you’d already decided the Big Bang theory’s
true. That was already a given in your mind.

Ross: Of course, the Bible teaches it.

Ross skirts around the issue. First, if the Bible really did teach this, it’s
amazing that God’s people were in the dark about his important fact till the
20th century. Second, he claims that before he came to the Bible, he
was already convinced that the big bang as true. So how can he say that he regarded
the big bang as a given because the Bible teaches it, before reading the Bible?!

Hovind: No, it doesn’t. But you’d already decided the
Earth is, the universe is billions of years old, and now you come to the Bible and
try to force that interpretation on God’s Word. That’s the wrong way
to come to it.

Hovind is right. Ross had already decided that the big bang was correct.

Yes let’s. Why did Ankerberg even bother asking Ross and Hovind, since he
may as well have pushed his compromise position all by himself!

Moderator: And that again Archer comments on this. He did this
at the council for Biblical inerrancy when they were writing the draft and they
asked him to do the exegesis on this. Gleason Archer used to teach at Trinity Divinity
School. Bruce Waltke used to teach, chairman of Old Testament at Dallas, these guys
wrote a workbook on the Old Testament together, and this is part of their commentary.
In terms of
Exodus 20:8–11, in terms of what the Sabbath is mentioning in referring
back to, he says, ‘By no means does this demonstrate that twenty-four hour
intervals were involved in the first six days any more than the eight-day celebration
of the feast of tabernacles proves that the wilderness wanderings under Moses occupied
only days.’ Remember Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years. So
it was a symbolic commemoration of that time is what they’re saying.

This is just a rationalisation. Yes, this was a symbolic representation of one time
period by a different one. But the Fourth Commandment compares like with
like. There is no point even trying to understand the Bible if a word in
the same passage and same grammatical context can switch meanings, without any hint
in the text itself. Also, the Fourth Commandment is unique in that both Ex 20:11 and
31:17
have the causal explanation ‘For in six days the LORD
made the heavens and the Earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested
on the seventh day’. The word ‘for’ (Hebrew ki,
also having the sense ‘because’) at the beginning of this expression
shows that the creation week is the very basis of the working week.

Moderator: And I just point this out that, how do we, the very
question you guys are grappling here, for our people that are at home, how are they
supposed to approach this? You’ve got the verse in Genesis chapter two where
it does seem to say that a day refers to the whole spectrum of whatever time period
those six days, seven days occurred in the first chapter. You have the day of the
Lord which everybody seems to agree can go on into eternity. You’ve got other
suggestions of periods of time.

Of course, but they are in completely different contexts, without evening/morning
or a number—something we have to point out repeatedly because guys like Ankerberg
persist in abetting Ross’s caricaturing our position with juvenile word games.

Ross: Well, let’s pick that theme up, I mean, Exodus twenty.
That whole idea of the fourth commandment’s repeated five times in the Levitical
law. Only two of the five times does it give you the divine analogy, for in six
days.

I’m not sure what Ross means, but how many times does God have to say something
before he will believe it?

Ross: And we also note in both cases the preposition is not in
the original. It simply says for six days—

Are these the same Hebrew scholars who got singular and plural, and perfect and
imperfect, back-to-front?!

Ross: … they assure me that the preposition’s not
there. I’ve read the original text, it’s not there in the original.

So? No explicit word is there in the Hebrew, but the grammar requires it when translating
into English. It’s nonsensical to require word-for-word translation. Also,
how does this help his case if there is no preposition? It’s just another
smokescreen. What Ross needs to do is to get rid of the causal word ki,
which he cannot do. So the link stands between six days of creation and six days
of work, with a seventh day of rest after both.

Hovind: And have you read the long critique of what you just said
on [Creation Ministries International] website on this very topic you’re
talking about?

Oh really? This is the expert opinion of a man who gets singulars and plurals back
to front, can’t understand lexicons, or tell the difference between perfect
and imperfect verbs!

Ross: It also ignores the problem of Leviticus chapter 25.
There you’ve got the case of God setting up a work period and a rest period
for the agricultural land. It was to be worked six years and rested on the seventh
year.

I ‘ignore’ it because there is no ‘problem’ at all! Leviticus 25 has
no causal phrase making any connection with the six days of creation, unlike Ex. 20:8–11.

Hovind: Correct.

Ross: So I go along with Gleason Archer. What you’ve got
in Exodus 20 is an analogy, not an exact equation.

Hovind: I disagree.

And rightly so, because the other examples are clearly analogies because they compare
oranges with apples (40 years and 8 days), but Ex. 20 is indeed an equation because
it compares apples with apples (6 days + 1 day of rest in both).

Day 2

Moderator: …. We hit day one last time, we’re now
going to talk about day two, [reads
Genesis 1:6–8]. Hugh, what happened on day two?

Ross: Well, hopefully, we agree here. I see that as a reference
to God establishing a stable, abundant water cycle. In fact one of our colleagues,
Dr Robert Newman, is both an astronomer and a theologian, wrote his masters’
thesis in theology on that very point. Careful exegesis of the words revealed, that
it’s speaking about God setting up an abundance of water in the atmosphere,
in the troposphere more correctly, water in the ocean, and you’ve got a cycling
which is gonna make possible sufficient water and the future continental land masses.

Moderator: All right. Kent?

Hovind: All right, if God set up the water cycle then, why did
it say later it had not rained upon the Earth? What you’re saying is, this—had
it rained upon the Earth for millions of years, was there a normal water cycle before?
Is this in day two?

Ross: Definitely.

Hovind: Well but the Bible says very clearly it had not rained
upon the Earth.

Ross: No, it doesn’t. No, you’re quoting from Genesis
chapter two.

Hovind: It says mist went forth and watered the face of the ground
because it had not rained upon the Earth.

But it is saying that there had been no rain up to the time man was created, which
would not be possible if the days were long ages. NB: the text
does not say there was no rain at any time before the Flood.

Ross: Yeah, but it’s in the same context that there is no
man, no plant, I mean it’s simply a re-statement of the initial conditions
you’ve got there in Genesis one. I mean, what you have in Genesis two is a
second account of creation, with a focus on human beings.

Hovind: A second account of creation focusing on day six.

Ross: Yes.

I wouldn’t call it a ‘second creation account’. Ross is right
to point out that it’s focusing on humans—it would be better to refer
to Genesis
1 as a summary outline of the whole creation, and
Genesis 2 as zeroing on the creation of mankind, preparing for Genesis 3
which explains the origin of sin, suffering and death. See
Q&A: Genesis under ‘Do Genesis 1 and 2 contradict each other?’
Both sides would answer ‘no’, and I doubt that either would disagree
with the explanations on this page.

Ross: Uh, the same sixth day, correct, which was a long period
of time.

Hovind: Which was a long period time.

Ross: Right.

Wrong! This is not a deduction from the text, but from the big bang.

Hovind: Okay, this is where you gotta make sure I understand what
you really mean by what you say, because I’ve read enough of your stuff to
know to check that out. The—so you think Adam was there a long time by himself.
You say he had to recover from surgery, and had to go to college for a semester
and learn—

Ross: Had to name all the animals.

Hovind: Name all the animals, and that took a long time.

No, not all the animals! Only ‘the beasts of the field’ and ‘birds
of the air’. Also the ‘kinds’ were broader than today’s
species. This is covered later in the discussion on ‘kinds’.

Ross: He had to work the garden of Eden.

The text doesn’t say that he had started working by then, only that this was
the purpose for placing him there (Gen.
2:15).

Moderator: Well, let’s go back to day three, we’re
gonna get to that, all right, what happened with Adam and Eve. But let’s keep
in context because our folks out here are trying to follow. So the fact is basically
day two, we have what happen?

Ross: Water cycle.

Moderator: Water cycle.

Hovind: I disagree. I think on day two we had a firmament established,
which is clearly later spelled out in Genesis 1:20 as being the place where the
birds fly. Genesis 1:20 says the birds fly in the firmament of heaven. So that’s
the atmosphere. It says there was water above this atmosphere. That’s what
it says very clearly. And then also in Psalm 148 verse 4 it says, there are still
waters above the heavens. I suspect God made three heavens. The first heaven is
the atmosphere where the birds fly. The second heaven is where the stars are, we
call it outer space, sun moon and stars. The third heaven is where God lives, 2
Corinthians chapter 12, the apostle Paul tells about being caught up to the third
heaven. And apparently there was a water barrier between each of those. The first
one is probably now gone, that’s what fell down at the Flood. I don’t
know if it was ice or water or moisture or what, but—

CMI doesn’t accept the Canopy Theory (which is what Hovind is referring to
here) as a direct teaching of Scripture—see CMI’s explanation for the
Flood waters from Q&A: Flood under ‘Were
the flood waters solely caused by rain, or something more? …’, as well
as Hanging Loose: What should we defend? for good
advice on dealing with extra-Biblical explanations of Biblical teachings.

Day 3

Moderator: All right, let me move you on, because you’re
gonna get into it in the day three here as well. Let’s just roll over into
it. This is what happened on day three. [reads
Genesis 1:9–13]. We have the receding waters of the ocean, seas and
lakes taking place, we have the emergence of land above the seas taking place, plants
and trees come forth at that point. What else do you guys see taking place and how
long was this going on?

Hovind: It took one day, 24 hours.

Ross: Oh, I would see it as taking a much longer period of time.

Hovind: Like how long?

Ross: Huh?

Hovind: How long?

Ross: Oh, probably in the order of a few hundred million years.
I mean, you’re gonna get these continents forming, right?

Hovind: The continents we have today?

Ross: Yeah.

Hovind: No. The continents today are a result of Noah’s flood,
the shapes are—

Ross: That’s—Kent, that’s six thousand miles
of plate tectonics in just a few months of time.

Hovind: That is assuming, of course, that today’s continents
are like they were in the days of Adam and Eve. See, what you’ve done is you’ve
taken some Scriptures that clearly apply to the flood, the worldwide flood in the
days of Noah, and—

Ross: Do you believe that tectonics is operable on the Earth?

Hovind: I was just on the San Andreas fault last week, yeah, it’s
moving.

Ross: Okay.

Hovind: Sure. That’s a result of the Flood 4,400 years ago.
The plates are still moving. "The fountains of the deep broke open," the
water came to the surface. They’re still settling and shifting. I’ve
climbed 40 volcanoes and taught earth science for years. Yes, sir.

Ross: But if you squish that much tectonics in that brief of a
period of time—

Hovind: Well, how much tectonics? What are you trying to do? Are
you trying to put Africa and South America together, is that what you’re judging
this by?

Ross: Either that, or just produce the mountains that are necessary
for your flood interpretation.

Hovind: No. In order to make Africa and South America fit for the
Pangea theory they put in the textbooks, they shrank Africa 35-40%. The Pangea theory
is just pure baloney. Plus, if you look—

Hovind: I don’t know, the Bible says the fountains of the
deep were broken open. There was probably some incredible continental movement during
that flood. And how you can teach it was a local flood, I—I don’t understand
that. I mean, why would God tell Noah to build a boat, fill it full of animals,
stay in there for a year—tell Noah to move. I mean, I can figure that out,
it was a worldwide flood.

Ross: He could have told him to move. But the main purpose here
is that God set up Noah to be a prophet. He says, build this gigantic boat in the
desert and preach to this wicked generation. If he had moved, he would have lost
his opportunity to preach.

But if the people had moved just to get away from Noah’s preaching, the Flood
wouldn’t have reached them. And what sort of credibility would Noah have had
with the antediluvians, building an ocean liner sized vessel to escape a local Flood?
And if the Flood was really local, did Noah realise this? If so, did he merely warn
the people against a coming local Flood, from which they could have easily escaped
by migrating? Such are the problems with denying the clear teaching of a global
Flood. Note that Ross’s and Ankerberg’s authority, Dr Gleason Archer,
also firmly rejects a local flood and affirms that the language teaches a global
one.4 See also
Q&A: Flood under ‘Does the Bible really claim that Noah’s
Flood was global?’

Hovind: Do you really believe that?

Ross: Yes, it says so in Hebrews and Peter.

Hovind: (laughs) So the purpose of this ark was just to get attention,
it was a ‘Hamburger Sunday’ to bring all the kids in?

Ross: God always gives his prophets a pulpit.

Where does Ross find this in Scripture? No other prophet had to make an ocean-liner-sized
pulpit! The Bible explains the reason for the Ark—to save Noah’s family
and representative land animals, without any hint of Ross’s ‘explanation’.

Day 4

Moderator: All right, we’re gonna, we got to get to that
too, but we’ve got to get through these seven days here. Can I move down to
day four, because this gets us into the light again [reads
Genesis 1:14–19]. Question: Did God make the sun, did God make the
stars on day four? Hugh?

Ross: … which means that they were formed either on the
fourth day, the third day, the second day, the first day, or in the beginning. Go
back to Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning, God created" the Shamayim wa’eres.
That includes all the matter, energy, space and time, stars and galaxies. So that’s
when the light was. That’s when the stars existed. And what you see there
in the text is, these are to serve for signs for the animals that are going to be
created in the fifth and sixth days. You’ll note that all the animals mentioned
in the fifth and sixth days are sufficiently complex they need at least the occasional
visibility of the sun, moon and stars to regulate their biological clocks.

Moderator: This is one I actually looked
it up and the Hebrew verb is wayya’as in verse 16 and according to
Archer again, "God had made the two great luminaries. This would be, Hebrew
had no special form for the pluperfect tense but uses the perfect tense, or the
conversive imperfect here to express either the English past or the English perfect.
So what he’s saying is God had made two great lights. So that seems to open
the door that sun and so on were already there, but it does say, He also made the
stars. Did He make stars on day four or did he make them at the beginning?

There is no basis for using the pluperfect from the Biblical text here (as opposed
to outside ‘scientific’ influences), because the reader reading the
waw consecutive would connect the making (NB not appearing) of
the lights with ‘Let there be lights’ of the previous verse. This is
different from
Gen. 2:19 where the pluperfect makes sense, because the reader would think
of the prior creation of animals in Gen. 1. For further explanation of the pluperfect
in Gen.
2:19, see
Creation Account, Times Two.

Note that the Ankerberg/Archer explanation ‘had made’ contradicts Ross’s
explanation that the sun, moon and stars really ‘appeared’, which is
not possible from the text. See The Sun: our special
star, note 1.

Ross: Well, it’s in the same qal-perfect form, which
means it could have been made any time in the past.

Actually it’s the same verb covering the stars as well, and it’s imperfect
as I’ve said.

Ross: He did do it in six days like He said. Six literal long periods
of time.

As I pointed out in my Exposé of The Genesis Question,
Ross has a very non-literal use of the word ‘literal’ if he thinks that
this is a literal meaning of ‘six days’. Nowhere in the Bible does ‘x
days’ mean anything but ordinary days (or parts of days). The same is true
of all other languages that I’m aware of.

Hovind: Six literal long periods of time. So here you have day
three, the plants living for millions of years without a visible, clearly visible
sun.

Ross: I’m saying the sun was always there. What was going
on is the atmosphere from day one to day four was translucent. Light was coming
though, but the observer on the surface of the Earth—the Spirit of God is
brooding over the surface of the waters—from that perspective, He couldn’t
make out the distinction of the sun, moon, and stars, only the light. It’s
like where I was raised in British Columbia. We got to see the sun maybe two days
out of the year, cause the rest of the time it’s overcast, which you’ve
got going on before the fourth day, as where it’s overcast all the time. Fourth
day, we have the atmosphere becoming transparent for the first time, and now we
can have God creating creatures that need these things for signs to regulate their
clocks.

Hovind: Okay, I disagree. You’re saying that the sun and
moon were created. The word created and made are used interchangeably all through
the Scripture, I’ve got a list of about I don’t know fifty or sixty
places where they’re used interchangeably, means the same the same thing.
He created and made. It means Genesis—

Both bara and asah are used interchangeably in Genesis 1:26–27:
‘Let us make ( asah) man in our image, …
So God created ( bara) man in his own image …’
Both are used of making man in God’s image so it’s Hebrew parallelism.

The distinction between these words is highly overdrawn. Just as in English, there
is considerable semantic overlap. Sometimes asah is used to mean ‘create ex
nihilo’, e.g.
Nehemiah 9:6:

You alone are the LORD. You made ( asah) the heavens,
even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the Earth and all that is on
it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes
of heaven worship you.

Indeed,
Genesis 1:26–27 is far from being the only place in the Old Testament
where the two words are used interchangeably in the OT, even in synonymous parallelism,
e.g.Isaiah
43:7:

everyone who is called by my name, whom I created ( bara)
for my glory, whom I formed ( yatsar) and made ( asah).

Days 5 and 6

Moderator: [Rehashes for the audience …] Our topic is—are
the universe and the Earth billions of years old or just six thousand years old,
also are Genesis one and two compatible with contemporary scientific evidence? And
this is a dynamite program right here because we’re gonna talk about what
aspect, what part did evolution play in the origin of life, if any. We’re
gonna talk about when, how did God create Adam and Eve, and we’re gonna talk
about light and a few other things. And we’re doing it in the—just going
down the list here of Genesis chapter one. And I’m gonna combine two days
here, guys, because it’s taking us a little longer than usual to get through
these days. What happened on day five and day six? [Reads from Genesis 1:20–28]
So it seems in these two days, you got let the water teem with living creatures,
the birds fly across the Earth across the sky, above the Earth across the sky, He
made the great creatures in the sea, then the livestock, creatures that move along
the ground, wild animals, and finally, man. All right. First
of all, start me off, does evolution have any place in any of this?

Ross: I would say no.

And CMI would agree, despite Ross’s claims to the contrary. That’s provided
that evolution is defined properly in the molecules-to-man sense, requiring an increase
in genetic information without intelligence.

Moderator: Why?

Ross: Well, just by scientific modeling, we can determine that
there is no possibility for a species changing into a distinctly different species
unless it exceeds one quadrillion individuals with a body size less than one centimetre
and a generation time less than three months. Which means it’s gonna work
for viruses and bacteria, but it’s gonna have no capacity to explain the existence
of new species of birds, mammals, or any of the creatures we see from the Cambrian
explosion onward.

I know of no biologist who says the things Ross says, and Ross is not qualified
in the subject. What has body size to do with anything? A chromosomal rearrangement
can result in mutual infertility, as can polyploidy. Of course, no new information
arises, so it is not evolution. But it is definitely speciation by definition. There
are proven examples of new species arising that don’t meet Ross’s criteria—see
Brisk Biters—Fast changes in mosquitoes astonish evolutionists,
delight creationists and other articles on Q&A:
Speciation.

In answer to such points in Ken’s and my webcast, Ross in his 25 Nov broadcast
proclaimed:

Ross: Well, we have the research papers right here, and all these
papers are claiming as evidence for reproductive isolation. That’s not the
same as speciation.

Here we go again—Ross’s attempt to intimidate intellectually by saying
‘we have the research papers here’. And again what he says is nonsensical—reproductive
isolation is the very definition of biological speciation!

Moderator: So folks on PBS are doing specials on chaos theory saying
that that’s the way it came about. What do you think?

Ross: Chaos theory in my opinion doesn’t
work. Yes, you can get departure from thermodynamic equilibrium, if you got a complicated
enough system and pick a small enough volume element in that system. But there’s
an important corollary. The farther you depart a system from thermodynamic equilibrium,
the faster it must snap back. As something as complex as a virus, the snap back
time is less than ten in the minus 120 seconds, so the fact that we’re all
older than that means that’s not how we got here.

Although Ross is here not saying anything that undermines Scripture and is attempting
to answer an atheistic theory, his apologetics is dubious and Christians who try
it might be burnt. Ross clearly doesn’t understand physical chemistry (my
speciality field) any more than he understands most of the other subjects on which
he pontificates. Ross is confusing what chemists usually refer to as thermodynamics
v. kinetics. The thermodynamic equilibrium depends only on the free energy
differences between starting and end materials (reactants and
products), while kinetics (reaction speed) depends on the free energy differences
between starting material and the transitional state or reaction intermediate.
E.g. a diamond exposed to the air at room temperature is very far from equilibrium
(which would be to form CO2), but the reaction is too slow to measure
because it requires a very high activation energy [diamond in isolation is not at
equilibrium either, but again conversion to graphite is too slow to notice].

Furthermore, Ross’s comment about ‘the snap back time is less than ten
in the minus 120 seconds’ is just absurd. Since the smallest viruses have
a radius of about 10 nm, it would mean a speed (distance/time) of over 10103
times the speed of light!

Moderator: So you’re saying all the plants, all the animals,
and man, none of that evolved.

Ross: No evolution beyond, you know, not the species level, the
genus level, order, family, none of that. Unless the species happens to have more
than a quadrillion individuals, which is only a few.

As will be shown later, Ross treats these man-made categories far too respectfully.
There has definitely been change across what has been called the genus level, as
shown by large numbers of fertile hybrids between so-called genera. This is discussed
in detail later.

Moderator: Kent, you’ve offered 250,000 dollars to anybody
that could prove that theory, give me some illustration of why you think they never
will.

CMI would prefer that creationists refrained from gimmicks like this.

Hovind: Well, all we’ve ever observed is dogs produce dogs.
Nobody’s ever seen a dog come from a non-dog. They might want to believe that
a dog and a banana have a common ancestor. I don’t care what they believe,
but that’s not science. And I certainly resent my tax dollars going to support
that.

I certainly sympathize, but the Bible does command us to pay taxes even to unjust
governments (as the Roman Imperial system certainly was)— Romans 13:6–7.

Hovind: … Do you—do you believe Adam was literally
made from dust and God breathed into his nostrils?

Ross: Definitely. Definitely.

Hovind: And Eve was literally made from a rib.

Ross: Uh, no a side of Adam. It doesn’t say rib in the text.
It says a portion of Adam’s side. So we don’t really know what kind
of biopsy God took out of Adam.

The Hebrew word tsela can mean either rib or side, depending on the context.
However, ‘rib’ is the right meaning in context, as all Bible translations
show, despite Ross’s dogmatism to the contrary, because v.21
says that God took ‘one of the tselot (the plural
form)’, meaning that Adam had more than one of them—‘one
of his “sides”’ doesn’t make sense. The next
verse says that God made Eve out of the tsela He had taken out
of the man — if Adam had a whole side rather than a whole rib taken out, he
would have been in a bad way. Modern medical science has shown that the rib was
the optimal bone for God to use—see Regenerating ribs:
Adam and that ‘missing’ rib. So once again Ross can’t
resist trying to score points off Hovind even in an issue where they are in broad
agreement, and once again it backfires.

Genealogies

Moderator: Okay. So we believe that God made Adam. Now let’s—what
are the tip-offs of when? We also have bipedal hominids going around, it seems,
from anthropologists, that go back past what the Bible says in terms of the genealogies
that are given.

Ross: Sure.

Moderator: Okay, let’s talk about that. How far back do you
think the genealogies take us in Genesis? Ussher said it was 4000 years BC.

Ross: Well, the Hebrew scholars I’ve talked to said there’s
obvious gaps in the genealogies, you can’t fix a precise date like Archbishop
Ussher did, who assumed no gaps.

Ross: Yeah, I would be hard-pressed to
push it any earlier than fifty, sixty thousand years. I’ve got friends who
try to push it back as far as a hundred thousand. Anything beyond that, I think,
is illegitimate.

But still, 50–60 ka is younger than many evolutionists claim the Australian
aborigines are. This would mean that according to secular dating methods, most of
which Ross accepts uncritically, and Ross’s chronology, the Aboriginals were
not descendants of Adam. Ken Ham and I pointed this out on our webcast.

On his 11 Nov broadcast in reply, Ross claims that some of the Aboriginal dates
are widely disputed, because they are due to the dubious thermoluminescent dating
method. Ross is certainly right that thermoluminescence is a dubious method, but
it’s a shame he is not as sceptical about other dating methods—see Q&A: Radiometric Dating. And 40,000 years is
widely accepted using methods that Ross accepts are right (although CMI does not,
obviously). For example, 14C with accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS)
is widely accepted, and the oldest 14C ‘date’ for human occupation
is 41,000 years ago for the Carpenter’s Gap site in the Kimberly.5 Ross failed to deal with my point about this widely
accepted date, but sidetracked on the thermoluminescence dates of the 60+ thousand
year dates, which are not necessary for our argument.

Even Ross in his book The Genesis Question says: ‘Australian Aborigines,
who date back to 25,000 B.C.’ (p. 108). However, Ross’s own date for
Noah’s Flood, which he believes was local but wiped out all mankind, is ‘between
twenty thousand and thirty thousand years ago’ (TGQ p. 173). So Ross’s
own dates call into question whether he thinks the Aborigines descended from Noah
and his three sons and their wives, the only survivors among Adam’s descendants.
Certainly the generally accepted ‘dates’ for Aboriginal occupation place
them well before Ross’s date for the Flood. There seems little basis for Ross’s
selectivity here.

Moderator: Right. So the fact is, is that both you and Kent are
in trouble as far as the anthropologists who want to take some of these other bipedal
primates, or hominids, back to oh, what a million years?

Ross: If you interpret the bipedals as human, then you’ve
got a problem.

Moderator: All right, so what do you guys do with them?

Ross: They’re not human.

Moderator: Why aren’t they human?

Ross: They’re just like the primates. They’re like
the chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas …

Hovind: Do you include Neanderthals as
being in this category?

Ross: They’re in that category, too.

Hovind: I disagree.

Ross: Why?

Hovind: Neanderthals were deformed humans, probably post-Flood,
they were still—they were burying people after they died. If a person lives
past a hundred years, there’s a disease called acromegaly where the pituitary
gland keeps secreting growth hormones, your ears get longer, your nose gets bigger,
and your bones in your forehead get thicker. The Neanderthals were simply post-Flood
humans were deformed from diseases, arthritis, rickets—

This is correct. However, Ross in his 11 Nov. Broadcast says:

I’m also surprised given the date for Neanderthals dating back 150,000 years
that these young-Earth creationists would want to make them part of the descent
of Adam and Eve.

Should be obvious—we don’t accept the date!

Ross: Kent, are you aware that they have enormous nasal capacities,
and that their DNA is radically different from human DNA?

Hovind: Well, now that’s deceitful to say it’s radically
different. It’s about 4% different, and it’s within the range of humans
today.

Ross: That’s huge.

Not at all. In fact, the DNA difference between the first Neandertal measured and
modern humans was not exceptional, and one sample showed modern humans more similar
to apes than Neandertals are—see Recovery of Neandertal
mtDNA: an Evaluation, an article ignored by Ross’s publications. And
the differences between the Neandertal and modern humans are less than those between
the common chimpanzee Pan troglodytes and the pygmy chimp Pan paniscus,
which hybridize so are the same Biblical kind (sometimes they are classified as
subspecies Pan troglodytes troglodytes and P. t. paniscus respectively
within the same species). Finally, the recent Scientific American article
Paleolithic Pit Stop: A French site suggests Neandertals and early modern humans
behaved similarly makes one wonder how real humans with souls and soul-less
hominids could behave so similarly.

Hovind: You could go downtown, downtown Los Angeles, and line up
people and make an exact same chart like they’ve got in your textbook, with
the skulls sloping, different diseases, and bone—noses larger, nasal capacities
larger—

Ross: No—no, no.

Hovind: They’re still human.

Ross: Okay, you can read a paper, I’ve got the paper here,
it’s by Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz, and they examine thirteen Neanderthal
skulls, complete skulls. And discover that the nasal capacity was so enormous …

Considering Ross’s demonstrated errors in understanding other issues outside
of his field, one is dubious about the level of his understanding of a paleoanthropological
paper. Anyway, paleoanthropology involves a lot of art rather than science, so it’s
unwise to be dogmatic.

Hovind: They could smell fine.

Ross: … it eliminated the possibly that Neanderthal was
biologically linked to any other land mammal species, not just primates. They said,
we got a problem here. We’ve got this Neanderthal that we can’t link
with anything.

Ken Ham and I on our webcast pointed out that a skeleton of a hybrid between Neandertals
and more ‘modern’ Homo sapiens sapiens was found in Portugal.
Ross tried to dismiss this on his 11 Nov. broadcast. But a leading Neandertal expert,
Erik Trinkaus of Washington University, St Louis, is convinced that this skeleton’s
mixture of features was evidence of extensive genetic exchange between Neandertals
and modern-looking humans. This would mean that they are really the same species
by definition, so it follows from the Biblical account that Neandertals were descended
from Adam and Eve.6

Hovind: You’re saying just because their nose is bigger,
they’re not linked to anything.

Ross: Not the nose, it’s the entire nasal capacity.

Hovind: Sure.

Ross: They have a nasal capacity that’s so huge, there’s
really no—and these guys are atheists—they’re saying how can we
possibly evolve this gigantic nasal capacity from any other species we see in the
fossil record or any other species we see on Earth? And they said we can’t,
we can’t come up with it.

This argument is outdated. There happens to be a wide variety of sizes within humans.
There are limits to the amount of information we can glean from bones alone, without
soft tissues available. The same applies to vocal tracts, and so it’s wrong
to conclude that Neandertals couldn’t speak.7

In fact, even Homo erectus was likely a variety
of post-Babel true human, since among many other indicators, its ‘cranial
vault thickness significantly overlaps that of Homo sapiens’.8 An earlier article by the same author (John Woodmorappe),Non-transitions
in human fossils, shows that the so-called species of Homo
( H. ergaster, H., erectus, H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthalensis)
are just racial variants of modern man, based on a wide range of physical characteristics.
But the Australopithicinae subfamily (including the genera Australopithecinae, Paranthropus,
Praeanthropus, Ardipithecus, as well as the questionable taxa Homo habilis
and H. Rudolfensis) are distinct from Homo in a lot of areas.
There are no transitional or even mosaic forms.

Races

In this section of my Exposé of the Genesis
Question, I expressed concern that Ross’s ignorance of genetics and
underestimation of the capacity for variation means that he believes that God had
to program racial differences at Babel (CMI says that the racial differences are
the result, not the cause, of the separation). In reply, Fuz Rana stated:

Rana: Now one thing I want to point out that it, and this is not
meant to be mean-spirited, but there is an error in the book One Blood with respect to what’s the cause
of skin color. Ken Ham and Carl Wieland and
Don Batten improperly attribute differences in skin color to the quantity
of melanin or the quantity of skin pigment found in the skin. That’s really
not what causes differences in skin color. What causes differences in skin color
is primarily the distribution of the melanin. Melanin is a pigment produced by cells
called melanocytes that encapsulate the melanin in a membrane bound structure, and
people with light skin have very small melanosomes that aggregate and people who
have dark skin color have larger melanosomes that’s widely distributed throughout
the skin.

Not meant to be mean-spirited? The explanation in the book One Blood is perfectly correct. It stated the fact
that dark skin was dark because it contained more melanin; it just didn’t
explain how. Note that a simplified explanation is not necessarily
an incorrect explanation, and there is a limit to how much can be explained
in a chapter of a book. If one person has larger and more melanin-containing bodies
in his skin, then he has more melanin. What was in the book was sufficient to make
the point that the difference between races is tiny—much smaller than the
difference within a race.

But to reinforce that Rana’s charge is just an attempt at point-scoring, while
the CMI authors know what they’re talking about, the 1996 Creation
magazine article by Jerry P. Moore says: 9

‘There are the same number of melanocytes [pigment-forming cells] to be found
in both Negroid and Caucasian skin.’ Other experts agree; the differences
in colouration arise from the way in which melanin (the dark pigment found in the
skin of all people) is packaged. The melanosomes (tiny melanin-packaging units)
are slightly larger and more numerous per cell in dark-skinned than light-skinned
people.

Since all three of the One Blood authors were (and are) on the Editorial
Committee of Creation magazine at the time of publication, it is absurd
to hint that they were ignorant of the finer points of skin pigmentation as Rana
implies. Rather, they just saw no need for sidetracking on more technical details.
This is shown further in the DVD Only One Race, showing cross sections
of ‘black’ and ‘white’ skin from this article to make this
very point that even the number of melanocytes is the same in all races, reinforcing
the point that inter-racial differences are biologically insignificant.

Here is an analogy: suppose I state in an CMI article that a billion carbon atoms
is three times more massive than a billion helium atoms [a correct statement when
referring either to the most common isotopes 4He and 12C,
or the usual atomic masses, taking the nearest whole number]. If Rana used the same
tactic, he might say (presuming that he knows enough about the subject): ‘Without
wishing to be mean-spirited, this is an error. It’s not so much the atoms
themselves that are heavier. Nearly all the mass of the atom is concentrated in
the nucleus, only about 100,000th the diameter of the whole atom. What
really matters is that the carbon nucleus has three times as many nucleons as the
helium nucleus.’ While this is correct, the first statement was correct too,
because if the nuclei are three times heavier, the atoms will be too. And it would
be reasonable to expect that with my qualifications in chemistry and nuclear physics,
I would be perfectly aware of the explanation, but had a reason for simplifying
the matter.

Speciation

Hovind: I would agree, nothing evolves beyond, I wouldn’t
use the word species, that’s kind of a nebulous term because a dog and wolf
and a coyote are different species. But they’re still inter-fertile, they’re
the same kind. I’d stick with what the Bible says, the animals bring forth
after their kind. The horse and a zebra—

Ross: How do you interpret kind? Do you think horses and zebras
evolved from one another?

Hovind: I think horses and zebras are the same kind. I interpret
kind like the Bible says, they’re able to bring forth. The ones that were
originally able to reproduce are the created kinds. Now there’s been variations
from there.

I agree with Hovind.

Ross: So how far up do you put the kinds? I mean, I just don’t
know what your position is.

Hovind: I don’t think anybody knows that, and that would
be a good field of research for science to get into.

Ross: Would you be willing to take past genera?

Hovind: I think with some areas. Now see, what we have here, is
we’re trying to take a modern 20th century classification system—you
know, that started with Carolus Linnaeus and has been refined many times—and
we’re trying to force that onto the Bible Now that’s the mistake. Just—the
Bible says they bring forth after their kind. A horse and a zebra probably are the
original created kind. One of the zoos in—I believe it was one in Hawaii,
they had a wholphin, they crossed a killer whale and a dolphin. They have, many
zoos have had a tigon or liger, cross a tiger and lion; they probably are the original
created kind.

Not true, as shown below, and it doesn’t necessarily matter anyway. As long
as hybridisation occurs, they are of the same created kind. But if Ross can’t
identify the kind with modern species, he won’t be able to parrot bibliosceptical
attacks on Noah’s Ark, by overloading it with everything that man’s
fallible wisdom has called a different species. Even on his 25 Nov. broadcast, he
claims that ‘4 million land species’ would need to be on board, displaying
his willing ignorance that CMI, following the Biblical Hebrew, teaches that insects
need not have been passengers on the Ark—see How did
all the animals fit on Noah’s Ark?

Hovind: Well, the wholphin, the wholphin did, after ten years it
produced a baby.

Ross: But not the liger.

Actually, female ligers, ‘on occasions, may be able to produce young.’10 But don’t let Ross put
a smokescreen around the fact that the wholphin is an example of a fertile cross
between so-called genera, yet Ross wants to tie down the ‘kind’
to so-called species by man’s definitions. Ross relies more on skeptics’
attacks than actual creationist claims—see again
this section of Who’s really pushing ‘bad science’?

Hovind: I don’t know about the liger. See, but even if they
get to where they can’t reproduce—

Ross: Or a mule.

[Although rare, mules have been known to produce young. One example is referenced
in a 1932 Time Magazine (archive) article. Also see
Mule gives birth, Creation25(2):9, for a more
recent example.]

Hovind: Well—

On the 25 Nov. broadcast, Rana claimed:

Rana: I mean in the case of the wholphin, what you’re looking
at is evolution happening at the family level, which is two levels in the biological
classification hierarchy above speciation, so this is no longer speciation. This
is evolution happening at the family level, which is quite extensive evolutionary
type of transformations.

Like his master, he has an amazing ability to miss the point completely. I.e. the
so-called ‘family’ is just an arbitrary man-made classification, which
in this case is really a single species.

Rana: Is that I’m sitting here listening to young Earth creationists
attacking us for taking an anti-evolutionary stance, and that’s highly ironic
because we’re accused, at least Hugh’s accused, of being a theistic
evolutionist, and of being a compromiser, yet who’s the camp that’s
siding with the evolutionists? It’s not us, and we’re being attacked
for taking a supernatural stance with respect to the creation of life. I mean in
the case of the wholphin, what you’re looking at is evolution happening at
the family level, which is two levels in the biological classification hierarchy
above speciation, so this is no longer speciation. This is evolution happening at
the family level, which is quite extensive evolutionary type of transformations.

The key issue is not how much ‘change’ we are willing to accept—we
are not interested in playing ‘more-anti-transformist-than-thou’ to
their untenable extent of denying speciation. Rather, the issue is the authority
of Scripture—including recent Creation, global Flood, and animals reproducing
‘after their kind’.

Moderator: But you guys, you’re arguing intramurally, and
the big argument is from the outside. Does the fossil record support the evolutionists
or not?

Hovind: I don’t—

Moderator: Plants, animals, man.

Hovind: Yeah, I never got a chance to respond to the cave man,
I don’t think, but uh—

Moderator: Well, let’s stick
with the outside world here for a moment, and the fact is, those folks out there
are simply saying, both you guys are wrong, the fact is, evolution did take place.
But I think most of our students recognize that even people like Gould at Harvard
are making a shift here, uh, punctuated equilibrium is really going against what
they originally started out with, all of a sudden it just appears on the record.
What—comment on this, please.

Ross: Well, it’s an excellent point, because what Gould and
Niles Eldredge are trying to do is make evolution work where mathematics tells us
it is the lowest possible probability. I mean, when the species population drops
down to a few thousand you get a zero probability of evolutionary advance. I mean,
when you look at the fossil record, where do you see the evidence for the so-called
transitional forms? It’s creatures like whales and horses. And these are creatures
of population levels so small, generation times so long, body sizes so huge, they
have a zero probably for evolutionary advance, they’re even lower for our
probability for evolutionary advance. Yet we see these, all these transitions. My
explanation for that, God loves horses and whales. He knows because of their huge
size and small populations, they’re gonna go extinct rapidly. When they do,
He makes new ones.

Yeah, right, God loves horses and whales so much that He lets them become extinct,
even before Adam’s sin which was the real originator of death. Actually, the
horses and whales are very different cases. As I point out in
The Non-evolution of the horse, the horse ‘series’ is constructed
from a rock badger on the bottom, while the rest comprises nothing but different
varieties of horses, little different in many respects from the range of sizes,
toe number, etc. seen in horses living today. However, as shown in Refuting Evolution, ch. 5,
the alleged transitional series of whales is nothing of the kind. Some of the creatures
are known from a few fragments of bones, and others like Basilosaurus were
totally aquatic and also totally unrelated to modern whales.

Moderator: When you guys are on campus, what do you say to the
kids who have grown up thinking that evolution is proven by the fossil record? What
are the things that you use?

Ross: Give them a mathematical model. I mean, one of the things
that we’re trying to do in university campuses is say, if you’re gonna
work in this discipline, you have to integrate mathematics with biology. Here’s
the principle. Most mutations, or many more mutations are negative than those that
are beneficial. The best you get is a ratio of 10,000 to one. In other words, mutations
will tend to drive a species to extinction before it has an opportunity to naturally
evolve, unless it has a truly enormous population size, more than a quadrillion,
a body size less than one centimeter, and a generation time briefer than three months.
Now you can go to the field biologists. Where do you see speciation going on in
the real world? They only see it for those species that match the mathematical limits.
Those that don’t, all they see are extinctions.

Again, this is novel biology, from a man lacking qualifications or knowledge of
the subject.

Ross’s minion Dr Fuz Rana, in their
25 Nov. broadcast, reinforced his master’s claim that CMI is teaching biological
evolution, and showed that he also refuses to grasp the information issue, just
like most atheistic evolutionary propagandists:

Rana: Okay, what they basically are trying to do is to dance around
the whole idea that they don’t embrace biological evolution by somehow claiming
that when changes happen in nature it’s not producing new information, that
God was responsible for putting all the information in place and it doesn’t
really change, no new information is added. … And to kind of point out that
they are holding to an evolutionary perspective, and that they are arguing even
though they are asserting that no new information is created, they do actually indirectly
argue for new information being created in an evolutionary process. Here’s
a paper I have from their website, it’s called Bears
across the world. It’s written by Paula Weston and
Carl Wieland, and this was published in Creation Magazine, and they talk about
the bears on the planet today being descended from a single bear kind, and with
respect to the origin of polar bears say that polar bears’ partly webbed feet
may have come from a mutation which prevented the toes from dividing properly during
its embryonic development, and this defect would give it an advantage in swimming,
which would make it easier to survive as a hunter of seals among ice floes. Thus
bears carrying this defect would be more likely to pass it on to their offspring,
but only in that environment. So what they’re talking about here is that mutations,
according to their model, are generating new information that allows bears to have
webbed feet and survive in its environment specifically.

How plain do we have to make it? We said that the webbed feet were the result of
a loss of information so that the toes didn’t divide completely,
but Rana uses this to ‘prove’ that we accept information- gaining
mutations. We have many examples of information-losing changes being advantageous,
e.g.wingless beetles on a windswept island.

Moderator: Right. And you’ve got some
great illustrations on DNA, too, Kent, in terms of people say that the DNA is similar
between this and that, and therefore they call that the transitional forms. But
talk to that a little bit.

Hovind: Well, he mentioned about God loves horses and whales, so
when they go extinct God creates new ones. This is the type of thing that makes
me so nervous about people following his teachings because there are so many things
like this thrown in there that just are simply unsupported by Scripture.

Ross: Psalm 104.

This psalm is in part a hymn to God’s acts in the past—note the past
tense of the verbs from
Ps. 104:5–9—but it is also a hymn of praise for God’s
provisions in the present, as shown by the present tenses of the verbs afterwards.
So Ps.
104:21 deals with the present day, not the original creation. It is poor
hermeneutics to interpret Scripture against Scripture, e.g. to use this verse to
deny that the animals were originally vegetarian as
Genesis 1:30 teaches. Note that Ross agrees that
Genesis 1:29 teaches that humans were created vegetarian, so it is inconsistent
for him to deny that animals were also created vegetarian, as taught in exactly
the same words in exactly the same context.

Hovind: The Bible says God finished His creation. He was finished.
I don’t think God’s creating new species all the time. I think it was
done. And when He looked at it, it was very good.

Ross: By the way, I agree. God has stopped creating new species
when He created Eve, that’s when He went into His period of rest.

Hovind: And how long ago was that?

Ross: I would argue that it’s probably in the neighborhood
of thirty to forty thousand years ago.

Hovind: Okay, we could argue that for a long time, but I think
it was six thousand years ago just like the Bible obviously teaches.

Moderator: But you’re both using genealogies to say there’s
an end in terms of the parameter, so you’re both basically on the same point
at that spot, that God stopped. So you’re saying that this origination of
new whales, new horses and so on was before that.

Moderator: But come back, please, because we’ve only got
about two minutes here. And that’s this thing of the DNA. Because the kids
hear this a whole lot, because of their similarity in DNA so therefore a man is
similar to this that and the other, and they use that as kind of a transitional
deal.

Right. The reason the DNA is similar in so many different
animals is we all have the same designer. Microsoft Word and Microsoft Powerpoint
have millions of similarities. That doesn’t prove they both evolved from Morse
Code. The same guys are writing the programs, that’s all. And the same God
designed the DNA of all the animals, and the DNA is incredibly flexible. There’s
a wide range of humans, there’s a wide range of dogs, you’ve got Great
Danes and Chihuahuas, and they probably had a common ancestor. It was a dog. That
doesn’t prove a dog and a banana are related. So the DNA code is just so,
so incredible. That must be an incredibly smart designer.

Moderator: Take a moment, can you remember some of the numbers
on some things that just show the dissimilarity, there is no transitional forms
going up?

Hovind: Oh, yeah, I’ve got a chart on my website, drdino.com,
people can look at, you know. Penicilium only has two chromosomes, you
know, so that must have evolved first. And then fruit flies have eight, so they
must be the next form, you know. Now a house fly and a tomato both have twelve chromosomes,
so obviously they’re identical twins. You know it’s hard to tell the
difference between a house fly and a tomato, you know. A possum, a redwood tree,
and a kidney bean all have 22 chromosomes. Identical triplets. You know, possum,
redwood tree, kidney bean, average scientist can’t tell them apart, you know.
They have—monkeys, chimpanzees, have more chromosomes than we do. Man has
46. Tobacco has 48. So if we keep evolving, we’re all gonna be a tobacco plant.
I mean, the whole idea is absurd, and how they believe this I don’t know.
But they just don’t like the idea that God created the world, that’s
obvious.

Chromosome numbering is not a sound argument, because the important thing is the
information on the chromosomes. To go back to Hovind’s analogy, Microsoft
Word and Powerpoint can be seen to have similar programmers because of similarity
in the programming—whether they are stored on one CD, ten 720-kb floppy diskettes
or twenty 60-kb floppies is irrelevant.

Biblical interpretation

Moderator: … You’re both Christians, but you interpret
the word day differently in Genesis. And Kent, first of all, start us off. What
is it that you are saying? What’s your position?

Hovind: My position is the very obvious literal Scriptural position
that everybody would get if they just read the Bible—God created everything
in six days, six 24-hour days, just like we know today. Any interpretation other
than that requires a leader to tell you what it means, and you end up with a cult.
I believe that’s what Dr. Ross has, is a teaching that requires him to tell
us what the Bible says, and you establish a position of authority for yourself,
and I get real nervous about that. The Bible says real clearly that God made everything
in six days, there was no death before sin, the flood in the days of Noah was a
worldwide flood that completely destroyed the world about 4400 years ago. And I
see no scientific reason, and certainly no scriptural reason, to believe anything
other than what the obvious, plain teaching of scripture is.

Moderator: All right, Hugh, what’s your position?

Ross: I believe that the plain, literal reading of the text is
that it’s six long periods of time.…

As I’ve said before, this is a very non-literal meaning of the word ‘literal’.

Ross: …Ten creation accounts in the Bible.
It’s not enough to take the Bible literally, we must take it consistently.
When you try to make all ten creation accounts say the same thing, it’s quite
obvious it’s impossible to interpret it as six 24-hour days, it must be six
long periods of time.

This is nonsense. There isn’t the slightest hint of this in Scripture.

Ross: As I mentioned previously we’re talking about a universe
that’s expanding, the Bible clearly teaches that, and stars and planets are
only possible if the universe has been expanding for billions of years. If it’s
just thousands, all you get is hydrogen gas.

And as I have previously replied, this is blatantly circular reasoning, and limiting
God to evolutionary mechanisms like the big bang and subsequent expansion and nucleosynthesis.

Moderator: All right, before we actually hit the topic, Christians
in the church have different positions. You were telling me that the Presbyterian
Church on their internet has put a statement after how long researching this topic?

Ross: I’ve got the statement here, it’s 92 pages, it’s
the result of a group of theologians studying the text for a two-year period, and
they all agree in Biblical inerrancy, that evolution can’t take place, it’s
got to be supernatural creation, they take the Bible literally unless the context
indicates otherwise, and they said there were four positions that fall within the
pale of Biblical orthodoxy. You’ve got the day-age interpretation, which I
represent. You’ve got the calendar day view, which Kent represents. You have
the analogical days, then you have the framework hypothesis, and so they’re
recommending that all four views be encouraged and be taught within their churches.

Moderator: Yeah. Would you guys agree that we need to have this
debate in the church?

Hovind: Oh, absolutely, yes.

Ross: Mm hm.

I would put it very differently to both of
them. It is rather an absolute scandal that this debate is even occurring. The Westminster
Confession, officially the standard for the Presbyterian Church of America, says
(article 4:1):

It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for the manifestation of the glory
of His eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning, to create, or make
out of nothing, the world, and all things therein whether visible or invisible,
in the space of six days; and all very good.

Moderator: And the fact is is that, I know
both of you have had folks make accusations against you. Hugh, you’ve even
been called a non-Christian because you hold to the particular view that you do.

By whom? Ankerberg should document his claims before trying to make a heroic martyr
out of Ross.

Ross: I’ve been called a lot worse than that, wolf in sheep’s
clothing and all of that.

Moderator: And Kent, I’ve listened to some of your debates,
where you’ve actually debated university professors on campus and it was a
hot time, you did marvelously well; it’s just uh, among Christians, we want
them to think about what the text is saying. Let’s uh, let me ask you both
this question. What do we do with science and scripture? In other words, how as
Christians do we approach it? Some people say, the Bible says it, I believe it,
I don’t care what science says. There’s other people that say, well,
we’ve got the Bible, it opens up the door, then science can lead us as to
the interpretation. Then others would say, forget what the Bible says, science first,
then, you know, everything else we’ll jam it in there. What do you guys think?

Ross: I think you have to make a distinction between the record
of nature and science. And the words of the Bible and theology. Theology and science
can definitely clash and contradict, cause human interpretation is involved. But
God created the universe, He’s the one who inspired the words of the Bible,
it’s a God that can’t lie, the record of nature can never contradict
the words of the Bible. But where we do see contradiction between science and theology,
we need to look for human misinterpretation. In fact I welcome these disagreements
because it’s a wonderful way to ferret out the interpretations that may exist
on either of those sides.

Moderator: What do you think?

Hovind: I agree. We need to look for human misinterpretation. But
what Hugh does, he looks for human misinterpretation of the Bible, as opposed to
looking for human misinterpretation of the scientific evidence.

Ross: I look for both.

Hovind: Well, what I’ve seen in your books that I’ve
read is that you’re quick to jump on some idea that maybe the Bible didn’t
really mean what it clearly teaches, and you’ve already decided—I think
you’ve been crippled by your education, because you think the universe is
billions of years old. I mean, that’s a given in your mind, that’s an
inflexible. And that’s not, that’s not logical to come at the Bible
study that way.

Moderator: But wait wait wait, the fact is, don’t we all
start with some presupposition?

Hovind: Oh, sure, everybody does, yeah.

Ross: If the Bible clearly taught that it was young, I would believe
that in spite of my astronomy.

The Bible does teach that the Earth is young, and it’s not ‘despite’
any astronomy, but consistent with astronomical data.

Ross: What I see is the Bible teaching it just as emphatically
as the scientific record.

Hovind: Okay, that is not what—let’s go to, pick a
spot where nobody’s heard of the Bible, pick out 5000 people and say read
this please, zero out of 5000 are gonna come back like he believes.

Ross: No, Kent, all you’ve got to—

Hovind: Oh, that’s right, one little grandma in Arkansas,
I forgot. One out of 5000.

Ross: Look at the early Church Fathers.

Yes, please do, because nearly all believed in a young Earth and global flood, and
most in ordinary days of creation11
— see also under Q&A: Genesis‘Church
Fathers and Reformers’ or
The Westminster View of Creation Days: A Choice between Non-Ambiguity or Historical
Revisionism [archive]. This is because they were not trying to fit the Scripture
into billions of years. Once again, it’s important to emphasize that the only
supporters for the Day-Age view are those trying to fit the Bible with billions-of-years
views. Liberal and neo-orthodox scholars (e.g. James Barr),
who deny the inspiration of Scripture, have no reason to try to make it say something
it doesn’t, so agree with the great exegetes of old that day really does mean
‘day’!

Hovind: The Hebrew calendar says this is the 5795 or something
like that. The Hebrews believe the creation was about 6000 years ago.

Ross: Well, my point is, when you read the writings of the early
church fathers, they wrote 2000 pages on the 6 days of creation, more than any other
text in the Bible.

Hovind: You talking about Origen?

Ross: I’m talking Augustine, Origen—

Hovind: You better read some of the other things those guys believe
too.

True—both of them allegorised many parts of the Bible. Their views on Genesis
were also not typical of the Church Fathers. Note also, Augustine did not believe
the days were long ages or that the Earth was billions of years old so he can provide
no comfort for Ross. Rather, he believed that the Earth was thousands of years old,
and he made precisely the opposite mistake of believing that creation was
instantaneous/simultaneous, due to the outside influence of neo-Platonic
philosophy.

Hovind: I’m gonna stick with what the Bible says, I don’t
care what any early church father said.

Moderator: But wait. When you say "Let’s
stick with what the Bible says," take the area of eschatology. Take the area
of Church government. Take the area of baptism. Take the area of predestination.
Okay? There’s a lot of disagreement in the Church on that. It doesn’t
mean they’re not Christians and the fact is, the Bible itself has to be the
standard.

Moderator: The question is, do we—I mean, the guys with the
Biblical inerrancy thing, went around the circle on this thing for days and days
and days. All right? And people like Francis Shaeffer, Gleason Archer, Walter Kaiser,
Norman Geisler, they all looked at this and the fact is they took this this day-age
position. They recognized other people took your position. But they kept the door
open. Because of the fact is that they saw that there was credible, Biblical evidence
that opens that door so that the scientific evidence has a chance of getting in
there.

Hovind: You’re doing the same thing he was doing though,
you’re confusing science with the idea that Earth is billions of years old.

True. Again, what Ankerberg says shows that they are making ‘science’
the final authority, and are trying to widen the meanings of words beyond what is
permissible in a specific context to try that. It would be better to believe the
Bible, and then try to interpret the data—they would find that the data interpreted
according to the Biblical framework ‘opens the door’ to correct science.

Hovind: It is true we see stars. That doesn’t prove they’re
billions of years old.

Ross: Yes, it does.

It certainly does not, as shown earlier.

Hovind: See, right here’s where the problem is. What we have
…

Ross: Talk to any astronomer on that issue.

Another appeal to authority. Of course, ‘any astronomer’ includes Dr Danny Faulkner, who disagrees with this! Ross
would do better to explain how seeing stars proves they are billions of years old,
because the infallible Word of God takes precedence over some fallible astronomers
any day. As shown before, what Ross means is the overtly
tautological reasoning that stars and planets will form naturalistically only if
the Universe has been expanding for billions of years, therefore the Universe must
be billions of years old.

Hovind: Just a minute. We can go look at Grand Canyon. We can make
three columns here. A fact. Grand Canyon exists. There are two interpretations of
this. It took billions of years to form, or it formed very quickly in the flood
of the days of Noah. What he’s confusing, and I think you just too, John,
you confuse the interpretation with the fact. You got to be real careful there.

Moderator:There’s another way of approaching
it. And that is, let’s say I am all wrong in my view. And you start off with
coming to the Bible. The first thing I would do is, whether I’m looking at
eschatology or whether I’m looking at predestination or whether I’m
looking at Jesus saying, you know, you have to be a little child to come into the
Kingdom of God. The fact is, these have meanings, and the text itself has to interpret
that for you. When you say, ‘Have other Christians come to this position?’
Yes, guys like Francis Schaeffer, who led the way in terms of apologetics and trying
to reach non-Christians; he held this view. Guys like Gleason Archer that do know
these, all these languages. They were, they were thrilled to see this. They’ve
written the lexicons and so on. They’re saying these words allow them that
door. They’re not saying that therefore because the door is open that this
is what science is saying. Look, anybody that had a view 500 years ago and said
our Bible view and our science view match up, the fact is, they’d be wrong
today. Because science looks like it changes every hour around here.

So why cling dogmatically to the big bang and billions of years, and twist the Bible
to fit?

Age of the Earth and Universe

Hovind: Okay. Now, twenty years from now when they pick a new number,
he’s gonna be left out in the cold, because he’s put so much emphasis
on this Big Bang theory and so much emphasis on this billions of years stuff, that
when this changes, he’s gonna look silly. 1905, the official age of the Earth,
I’ve got the textbooks, was 2 billion years. Today it’s 4.6.

Ross: That’s still a lot older than what you’re prepared
to concede.

The point was that the age once dogmatically proclaimed as fact has been revised
upwards by >100%!

Hovind: From two billion to 4.6 billion is a gigantic jump.

Ross: Hold it, I’ve read the paper, the guy who wrote the
two billion is Edwin Hubble. If you read his paper, 1929, he cautioned people outside
of the field not to look at this as anything more than a demonstration that the
universe is expanding over billions of years.

Ross is confusing the age of the Earth with that of the universe. More namedropping
and bluff.

Ross: Because it said his data points are really noisy. This needs
to be done with greater precision. We’ve done that with greater precision,
now we’ve got the number down to better than 10%. Wait a couple years we’ll
get it down to five percent.

Hovind: You’re convinced the Earth is 4.6 billion years old,
and that’s within 10%.

Ross: It’s better than that, it’s within a tenth of
the percent.

Hovind: Oh, a tenth of a percent.

Ross: 4.57 billion, plus or minus .01.

So now Ross is an authority on geochronology too?!

Hovind: See, this kind of, this is what magicians do, they dazzle
the audience with these numbers, you know, wow, watch this over here, well there’s
a magic trick going on.

Ross: Well, Kent—

Moderator: The difference is that if the scientific community is
using every which way to try to establish that, why would we be against the fact
of at least looking at their evidence?

Hovind: Oh, I think we should. But see, the confusion comes when
you tie the interpretation to the fact. Yes, Grand Canyon is there. One group says
it took millions of years. I say, wait a minute now, the top of Grand Canyon is
higher than the place where the river enters the canyon. Rivers don’t flow
uphill. That river didn’t make that canyon.

Moderator: Yeah, let’s talk about the
flood a little bit later, but the fact is, in terms of, I think you were saying
let’s go back to that speed of light thing, because we missed that in the
other program.

Hovind: Yeah, we do see the stars.

Moderator: The fact is is I think you’ve said now that there
are quite a few ways that you’ve measured the speed of light.

Ross: Right.

Moderator: I think thirteen different tests that scientists have
made in terms of speed of light, because it’s been challenged within the scientific
community itself, and of course if the speed of light gets messed up, then Einstein’s
relativity theory goes down the tubes, string theory goes down the tubes, all kinds
of things go down the tube. But give us a little background of why now you feel
so sure about the speed of light.

Ross: Okay. When astronomers measure hyperfine split lines, we’re
measuring the velocity of light when the light left that star or galaxy. And astronomers
have been routinely making these measurements on millions of different objects.
What we see is the identical velocity of light that we measure here on Earth. We’ve
been able to do this to galaxies as far away as 14 billion light years. So the velocity
of light has not changed over the last 14 billion years. That’s a direct measurement.
Now, we can combine that with a theoretic measurement. E=mc2. You make
c different it’s gonna effect e or m. The velocity of light is a little bit
higher for Adam than it is for us, he gets incinerated by the heat of the sun, or
you don’t have the elements to make Adam in the first place.

If Ross is going to make this charge against Setterfield’s c-decay model (which
basically parrots a claim made by a leading atheistic anti-creationist in Australia),
he should at least rebut the answer Setterfield gave to this problem many years
ago: mass itself is inversely proportional to c2, so
that energy is still conserved. He claims that there is experimental evidence that
the charge to mass ratio of an electron has been decreasing (supporting his claim
that mass has increased as c2 has decreased). Whether Setterfield’s
data is convincing is another matter, but Ross needs to address it. It’s hardly
the first time Ross parrots the arguments of bibliosceptics against creationists,
ignoring the answers creationists have presented long ago.

Moderator: You also were talking, and I’ll let Kent get in
here, the fact is apparently there’s certain lines that spread out as it gets
to us.

Ross: You’re talking about the idea that maybe
Duane Gish makes a proposition for example that light didn’t come
from the stars and galaxies, God sent it from an intervening point only six thousand
light years out.

Moderator: Yes.

Ross: But we can prove that’s not true to direct observation.
As a beam of light travels through space, it passes through dust and gas. What the
dust will do is redden the continuum. It’s kind of like we see with the moon
during a forest fire, it gets redder and redder as the smoke gets denser and denser.
And as it goes through gas clouds, those gas clouds have movements, and that’s
gonna Doppler broaden the spectral lines. And therefore a test of whether or not
the objects came from the stars and galaxies, are there more distant objects, more
reddened in the continuum, and broader in their spectral lines, and it’s a
direct proportion. The farther away the object is, the broader the spectral lines,
and the deeper the red of the continuum.

Moderator: Which all means what?

Ross: Means the light must have come from the stars and galaxies,
rather than from some intervening point.

Ross: If it came from those distant galaxies, then the light must
have been travelling for billions of years, cause the velocity of light we can measure
and prove theoretically did not change.

Moderator: Okay, we’ve got about a minute and thirty left.
I’ll give you the last minute and thirty. Go for it.

Hovind: I recommend that anybody watching this call Duane Gish
and say, did you really say that? Because I bet I got 25 or 30 letters and calls
from people saying Hugh Ross misquoted me, he didn’t—you know, it’s
not correct.

Given Ross’s proven (and well documented on this website) tendency
to misrepresent creationists, I also wouldn’t trust Ross’s quotes.

Hovind: … I mentioned earlier, you can’t tell the
distance to these stars, 14 billion light years away. They might be—they probably
are. But we can’t measure that, and it’s silly for us for humans, little
humans on Earth to say, we know the distance to that star, 14 billion light years
away, it can’t be done.

Ross: Okay. Astronomers view the credibility
of a young Earth as being much weaker than that of a flat Earth.

Hovind: Wait wait wait. Just this blanket statement. Astronomers
say. As if he’s speaking for all astronomers. I just spent the last three
hours with Danny Faulkner, who is an astronomer,
who would love to debate you by the way.

Ross: Sure.

Hovind: Would you be willing to do that?

Ross: Definitely.

Hovind: Oh, please, call Danny Faulkner—

Moderator: Okay, keep going.

Hovind: He says you’re wrong, the Earth is only 6000 years
old.

Ross: Yeah, based on the Bible.

Before, Ross was claiming that the Bible unambiguously teaches six long ages, so
Ross’s position is totally Biblically based (he claims). Now he chides an
astronomer for trusting God’s word and believing that the Earth is only 6000
years old.

Ross: He’s admitted to me that if you look at the astronomical
evidence there’s no case.

There is no evidence from astronomy to disprove
a ‘young’ Earth, as opposed to indirect evidence that can be interpreted
in other ways.

There are a number of processes that indicate, even given uniformitarian
assumptions, that the universe is much younger than billions of years, and he gives
some examples.

This is hardly the words of a man who believes ‘there’s no case’,
so Ross’s credibility is on the line here. Note that Dr Faulkner is also a
keynote speaker at CMI’s coming Creation Supercamp in Australia.

Ross: He’s been arguing me in print for years that young
Earth creationists need to pay attention to astronomy, because they’ve got
a profound challenge there.

This is also a very loose paraphrase of what Dr Faulkner claims. Yes, creationists
should study astronomy, and no, we don’t have all the answers, but this is
true of all science and hardly the same as ‘no case’ for a young universe.

Ross: My point was this. Given that the astronomical community,
and I’ll except Danny Faulkner—

Hovind: I won’t give that. Right away you’re assuming
that everybody’s on your side and it’s just simply not true.

Note that the same appeal to majority view would backfire on Ross when he opposes
biological evolution—the majority of biologists believe in evolution, after
all!

Ross: Hang
on. Given that there are so many well-known astronomers who have put in print the
statement that I’ve just stated, shouldn’t you at least talk to those
astronomers and determine why they view the astronomical evidence for a Young Earth
to be so incredible?

Hovind: Sure, I’m willing to read anything on the topic.
I’m willing to talk to anybody. But I think you’ve got some built-in
assumptions.

Hovind: We don’t know that the speed of light—you’ve
never been to the moon, you’ve never measured the speed of light out there.
We don’t know the—the speed of light may be consistent. I don’t
know. My point is, we don’t know what light is. Is it a wave, a particle,
a photon? What is—give me a jar of it and paint it red. Nobody knows what
it is.

Moderator: What do you think?

Ross: We know what light is.

Hovind: What is it?

Ross: It’s a photon. Which has both a wave property and a
particle property. And it’s the principle of quantum mechanics.

Hovind: You’re giving it a name, but that’s not telling
me what it is.

Ross: Well, a light packet is a set of photon—

Hovind: It’s a packet?

Ross: Yes.

Hovind: Ziplock bag or what?

Ross: (laughs) Okay. We’re talking about—do you believe
that quantum mechanics is true? I mean, not all young Earth creationists do, I don’t
know what your position is.

Well, not all old Earthers or evolutionists do either, so what does this prove apart
from showing that Ross is not above cheap guilt-by-association ploys? It should
be clear from published articles that neither of the major creationist organisations,
[Creation Ministries International] or Institute for Creation Research,
have any problem with QM, as opposed to some interpretations of QM. For
example, see
Should creationists accept quantum mechanics?; Blowing Old-Earth Belief
Away, notes 1 and
2; Olfactory Design: Smell and Spectroscopy.
Therefore there was little point to Hovind’s side-tracking instead of sticking
to the issue at hand. It must be said that Hovind gave Ross the perfect excuse to
use that ploy, and there is nothing else in Ross’s answers about QM to which
a creationist should object.

Sin and the origin of death and suffering

Moderator: … Our topic is, are the universe and the Earth
billions of years old or just six thousand years old? Also, are Genesis one and
two compatible with contemporary scientific evidence? And right now we’re
talking at an interesting spot, and that is, in terms of the Bible, as well as science,
when did entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, come into place? Did it come
into place when God created everything at the Big Bang? Or when God created it on—Kent,
you’ll have to tell me, on the first day, or when Adam sinned? Now you say,
what in the world does that have to do with it? Well, the question comes up of Romans
chapter 5 verse 12, what the apostle Paul talks about when he says, therefore just
as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and in this way
death came to all men because all sinned. Did death come into the world only at
the moment that Adam sinned? Well, if it did, then the fact is, that the days have
to be 24-hour periods of time. Why? Because you’ve got the animals and the
plants. Or, are you saying that death does not apply to the animals and the plants?
The animals and plants dying, we’re talking about entropy. Do the stars burn
down before Adam sinned? Is digestion taking place? Am I going the right direction
here? Start me off, would you?

Ross: Okay, you’re referring to Romans chapter 8 where it
says the entire creation is subject to the law of decay. That means that all of
the universe throughout all of its space/time dimensions, and so I would interpret
that that the second law of thermodynamics has been in effect since the creation.
As you point it out, you’ve got stars before the fall of man and after the
fall of man. Stars are extremely sensitive to the laws of physics including the
laws of thermodynamics. Stars are impossible without the second law of thermodynamics,
gravity, and electromagnetism. You’ve got Adam and Eve eating before the fall
then after the fall. Again, extremely sensitive to the laws of physics including
thermodynamics. What happened at the fall as we see in Genesis three is that humanity
changed, not the world. The curse was that there would be more pain, not pain for
the first time, there’d be more work, not work for the first time. Adam after
all was commanded to work the garden of Eden before he sinned. Therefore we’ve
got the continuous operation of the laws of physics, and as an astronomer I can
tell you, if there was any change in the laws of physics, we would see a discontinuity
as we look back in time. We see no such discontinuity.

That the laws of thermodynamics were in operation before
the Fall is hardly news to CMI—Did the 2nd Law
begin at the Fall? However, Ross is wrong that there is no discontinuity
at all at the Fall —God removed some of His upholding power so that the 2nd
Law resulted in decay and finally death.

Moderator: Define death, then.

Ross: Okay,
Romans 5:12 is speaking about human death. That’s when human death
came into effect for the first time. Notice the text says death through sin. Only
human beings amongst all species of life can experience death through sin.

Ross: And then Paul closes it off by saying death through sin was
visited upon all human beings. He’s careful to exclude the plants and the
animals as he does in
1 Corinthians 15:20–22. Again he limits it to humanity.

The passage doesn’t limit it to humanity, since there is nothing saying only
human death. Rather, Paul is concentrating on the human aspect because he is linking
it to the resurrection from the dead, which applies only to humans. The larger context,
e.g. taking the other Biblical passages into consideration, makes it clear that
there was no death of any living creatures before the Fall. Here is a summary:

Vegetarianism in both humans and animals before the Fall (Gen. 1:29–30).
As I pointed out before, Ross accepts that these verses teach original human vegetarianism,
but he is inconsistent in denying the original animal vegetarianism taught in exactly
the same words in exactly the same context.

The creation was ‘very good’ (Gen.
1:31), so would not have contained death, ‘the last enemy’ (1 Cor. 15:26).

The restored paradise will have no bloodshed in the animal kingdom—Isaiah 65:25

Hovind: You’re arguing apples and oranges here. If you have
death before sin, you’re saying this is the way God made it. And when God
looked at everything in Genesis 1:31 and looked at everything and said it’s
very good, I don’t think it’s very good for the zebra to have the lion
tear its guts out.

Ross: Okay. Maybe we disagree on eschatology. I believe the perfect
creation, the new creation of Revelation 21, will replace the very good creation
of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. There’s a much superior creation that’s
coming. Yes, it was good, it was very good.

Hovind: It was very good when the animals were being eaten by each
other. You’re saying that was very good.

Ross: Hang on.

Hovind: Just answer the question. Yes or no.

Ross: I’m disagreeing with you. I would argue that conditions
would be worse for the herbivores if you take the carnivores away, there’d
have been greater suffering if there wasn’t carnivorous activity.

Hovind: So that’s a round-about way of answering the question,
yes, you believe God originally designed it for the herbivores to be eaten by the
carnivores.

Ross: Correct.

On Ross’s broadcast of 25 Nov, he claims:

Well, see, in their [CMI’s] theology, you have carnivorous activity evolving
from herbivores after the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. And so you
start off with these herbivores and rather quickly wind up with a carnivore …
plant eaters, sheeps and goats, then you wind up with lions and tigers.

Of course this is just dishonest, because we have never claimed anything that remotely
resembles sheeps and goats changing into bears. Our explanations have involved:

Use of structures originally designed for herbivory, but with a change of behaviour
after the Fall, often combined with information-losing mutations. E.g. there is
a vegetarian piranha relative called the pacu that
uses its powerful teeth and jaws for eating plants, but mutation may have caused
the pacu to lose one row from its double row of teeth so it could be used only for
eating meat. Some baby spiders use their webs for catching
pollen for food, but now the pollen lacks an essential amino acid (possibly
the result of the curse on vegetation in
Genesis 3:18) so this can’t be done indefinitely in this fallen world.

Turning on latent genetic information designed for attack and defence, which had
been pre-programmed by God for life in a fallen world that He foreknew.

Hovind: I disagree so strongly. And I think you really get into
some some wild doctrines then.

Hovind is right and Ross is wrong, according to the eminent Reformed theologian
Douglas Kelly who wrote:12

I would simply suggest that to interpret ‘very good’
as including pre-Fall pain, death, etc. is simply inadmissible in terms of proper
Hebrew exegesis. If one can turn a word (or two words— tobh me’od)
upside down on its head to mean the exact opposite of what it clearly says, the
authority of Scripture is a nose of wax to be shaped by the changing culture.

Also, respectable commentaries on Genesis by Calvin,
Keil and Delitzsch, and Leupold affirmed that ‘very good’
in this context means completely without any trace of evil, e.g. Keil and Delitzche:13

God saw his work, and behold it was all very good; i.e. everything was
perfect in its kind, so that every creature might accomplish reach the goal appointed
by the Creator, and accomplish the purpose of its existence. By the application
of the term ‘good’ to everything God had made, and the repetition of
the word with the emphasis ‘very’ at the close of the whole creation,
the existence of anything evil in the creation of God is absolutely denied, and
the hypothesis entirely refuted, that the six days’ work merely subdued and
fettered an ungodly, evil principle, which had already forced its way into it.

Moderator: Well, let me bring up the
fact here of the fact is, the Bible says that in the day that you eat, you will
die. Did he die on that day?

Hovind: He died spiritually. There are three kinds of death in
the Bible.

Moderator: But so he didn’t die physically on that day.

Hovind: Well, if a day is like a thousand years, he—nobody
made it over a thousand, so I guess yes he did in that sense.

First, once again Hovind misinterprets ‘a day is like a thousand years’
as shown above and in Q&A: 2 Peter 3:8—‘one
day is like a thousand years’. Second, the correct answer to Ross’s
team mate…oops—I mean impartial moderator, Ankerberg, is that Genesis 2:17 is
best explained by taking the promise of death in an ingressive sense. A
literal translation is ‘dying you shall die’.
In other words, the focus is on the beginning of the action of dying, which results
in the translation ‘ … for when you eat of it you
will surely beginto die.’

Hovind: He died physically in that same—he began to die right
away, that’s probably when the second law was introduced.

Moderator: So the fact is is that it’s
not necessarily talking about physical death there.

Hovind: Well let me ask you one question on this same topic.

Moderator: Yeah.

Hovind: If Adam had not taken the fruit, would he have eventually
died anyway?

Moderator: I think so. I’ve been thinking about both of what
you would say, and I don’t know what you’re gonna say on this, Hugh,
but I’ve been thinking about that, because it talks about the fact of, you’ve
got this this tree of life. Okay? And you see you can’t eat the tree of good
and evil. But the fact is, you can eat of this tree of life. It was expected that
he would. Now after Adam sinned, okay, God put the cherubim at the gate so that
he couldn’t go back in. Apparently he could have eaten after, even after he
had sinned. Implying the fact is if he did, he would have lived forever as a sinner,
so actually it was God’s grace that He kicked him out so he would die physically
to be redeemed and so on. But that would imply that he had to eat in the garden
of that tree to stay alive, which would imply, to me, that he could have died. Doesn’t
it?

Hovind: Well, you’ve got a long, several assumptions from
the fact. I mean, you get several generations—

Yes, and an elementary logical fallacy called denying the antecedent. In
the inference: ‘If Adam keeps eating fruit, then Adam would have lived forever’,
the antecedent is: ‘Adam keeps eating fruit’ and the consequent is ‘Adam
lives forever’. Denying the antecedent is saying ‘If Adam didn’t
eat the fruit, then he wouldn’t have lived forever.’ To see why this
is a well-known fallacy, compare an argument with the same logical structure: ‘If
I step in a puddle, my feet will get wet. So if I avoid puddles, my feet will not
get wet.’ However, there are plenty of other ways to get your feet wet, so
avoiding puddles is no guarantee.

Poor logic has the potential to lead people into heresy—one example is baptismal
regeneration, which some support by citing the following statement of Christ, according
to the Majority Text of
Mark 16:16: ‘Whoever believes and is baptized will
be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.’

Interpreting the first part of this to claim that anyone who is not baptized will
not be saved is another example of the fallacy of denying the antecedent. And it
would contradict clear statements in Scripture that salvation is by grace through
faith, not by works, e.g.
Eph. 2:8–9 (just as Ankerberg’s faulty logic leads him into
conflict with scriptural passages of no human death before sin). The second part
states explicitly that unbelief results in condemnation, which is consistent with
the rest of Scripture.

Audience questions

Moderator: Welcome. We’re talking with our guests, Dr. Kent
Hovind and Dr. Hugh Ross, about science and creation, evolution. We’re talking
about is the age of the Earth billions of years old or just six thousand years old.
And we’re talking about how does all this square with the Genesis record.
It’s been a very interesting talk, and we’re gonna do questions and
answers now from the audience, and I can hardly wait to hear what these folks are
gonna ask. Number one.

Guest: This question is for Dr Hovind. We know that you believe
that there are several areas where the science needs to be reinterpreted to agree
with the words of the Bible. But do you believe there’s any instance where
the traditional interpretation of the Bible needs to be adjusted to agree with the
scientific evidence?

Hovind: I guess I’d have to know what you mean by, whose
traditional interpretation—

Guest: Theology. Do you believe there’s any instance where
theology needs to be adjusted to agree with science?

Hovind: Well… I don’t know
of any contradictions between the Bible and science. I love the Bible, I love science,
I taught it for years. …

Guest: Well, to give an example, how about the fact that a thousand
years ago some Christians thought the Bible taught that the world was flat?

Hovind: I think you’d find if you studied that out, it was
some heathens that were teaching the Earth was flat, and a lot of Christians today
get accused of believing things in the past. The Bible clearly teaches the Earth
is round, in Isaiah chapter 40 [verse
22].

Hovind: … the fact that we
see so many things in entropy like the moon leaving us a couple inches a year, or
the human population getting more genetic load. All of the things from entropy indicate
the universe is not billions of years old. Maybe, you know—

Moderator: Let’s talk about that one, too, the fact of in
the fact of the moon pulling away. You’ve got the moon in couple of examples.
Number one, of the moon pulling away a couple inches every year, therefore if you
take it all the way back to the beginning, the Earth ought to be young. All right.
Is there something wrong with that idea?

Ross: Definitely. He’s assuming that the spiraling away of
the moon from the Earth is linear. No astronomer believes it’s linear. Newton’s
laws of motion prove that it cannot possibly be linear. You use those laws, you
discover that it’s consistent with the moon separating close to the Earth
about four and a quarter billion years ago. And so the spiraling away of the moon
is consistent with an old Earth interpretation, not a young Earth interpretation.

Ross has it totally wrong. Creationists most certainly do not assume that
the recession of the moon was linear. The whole point is that the recession rate
is inversely proportional to the sixth power of the distance, so would
have been much faster in the past. I pointed this out in my 1998 article
The Moon: The light that rules the night, note 8; this was in turn based
on a 1990 article by Dr Don DeYoung. So Ross has
no excuse for once again mis-representing what creationists claim.

Hovind: … The Bible tells us clearly in Exodus 20:11, I
want you to rest on the seventh because I made everything in six days. Everything
in heaven, and Earth, the sea, and all that in them is. And if the average layman
cannot understand that verse, then the Bible is incapable of being understood.

Ross: Well, I agree with that, it was done in six days.

Hovind: But see this is—

Ross: You see that in the Westminster Confession, that God created
the universe in six days. Notice the Westminster Confession doesn’t say six
24-hour days. It just says six days.

As I’ve pointed out, it says ‘in the space of six days’. They
didn’t say ‘six 24-hour days’ because it would be stating the
obvious—no one would have had any doubt what it meant at the time of writing.
In fact, the Reformers reacted strongly against the few church Fathers who allegorized
the days of creation—and I repeat that they allegorized it in a diametrically
opposite way to Ross by teaching that Creation Week was really an instant.
It’s only modern theologians kowtowing to secular ‘science’ that
try to make ‘white’ mean ‘black’ that can deny the intended
meaning of the Westminster Confession.

Catastrophism

Hovind: This is uniformitarianism. This was Charles Lyell’s
problem, and several times in the previous debates, Hugh has referred to the fossil
record or the geologic column. Well, I taught Earth science for years, you can only
find that dumb geologic column one place in the world, and that’s in the textbooks.
It doesn’t exist. Charles Lyell made up the whole thing. All those—oh,
some other people helped—all those layers of rock that we see were formed
during the flood in the days of Noah. I’ve got pictures on my website of petrified
trees standing up running through a whole bunch of different layers.

Ross: You’re misrepresenting the field. What geophysicists
and geologists believe is that it’s a combination of catastrophism and uniformitarianism.

Hovind: Here you are speaking for all geologists again. You do
this consistently, and I wish you’d stop and think about what you’re
doing.

Actually, because of the uniformitarian bias, it took about 40 years before Harlen
Bretz’s explanation of the Channeled Scablands eastern Washington State—the
catastrophic Spokane Flood: when ancient Lake Missoula in Montana (USA) burst an
ice dam in Idaho—was accepted. This is explained further in
Mammoth: Riddle of the Ice Age.

Hovind: I can find lots of geologists that don’t endorse
the idea that, that do believe that all those layers were deposited in a flood.

Ross: I would agree, but many floods, not just one.

But this is again because of their bias—they fit the millions of years between
the layers, just where there is no evidence for any passage of time! In fact, there
is often a lot of evidence against long time spans, because of features such as
rain drops, ripples, tracks which would be eroded quickly if not preserved rapidly
by the next layer of sediment, including mineral-rich water to cement the patterns.

Hovind: No, just one big flood formed nearly all the layers. And
so, in one sense it doesn’t matter what any geologist says. What does God’s
Word say? It’s real clear. Your idea of a local flood in the days of Noah,
then you’re assuming that all of these layers of rock that we see all over
the world were formed slowly over billions of years—

Ross: Some, not all.

Hovind: Okay, nearly all. There’s just no difference between
what you teach and what the evolutionists teach. And your teaching is gonna destroy
people’s faith in God’s word, and it’s gonna not lead people to
the Lord, it’s gonna let—young Earth creationism is the plain, obvious
interpretation.

Moderator: Well, well let’s hit that,
I mean, you know we’ve just got to stop there. The fact is, why? In other
words, when you have people like Francis Shaeffer, Norm Geisler, Gleason Archer,
Bruce Waltke, and a whole lot of folks like that that may disagree on a 24-hour
period of time, you can’t accuse them of being non-evangelistic, not standing
for the inspiration and inerrancy of the word of God.

Here we go again, the Moderator bailing Ross out by taking
sides. As shown, all these people are motivated by trying to rescue the Bible from
a perceived conflict with ‘science’ by reinterpreting the Bible rather
than questioning the ‘science’.

Hovind: Right, I understand that.

Moderator: You can say they disagree, but you can’t accuse
them in terms of motive. And I think also the fact is that right along this line,
there’s one verse that is an interesting one, I’ve been thinking about
it. Excuse me for butting in on your time here.

No, we shouldn’t excuse him, because of his persistent partiality.

Moderator: Psalm 19:1 and 2 says, and you both quoted this in your
stuff, the heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his
hands. Day after day they pour forth speech. Night after night they display knowledge.
There’s no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice
goes out into all the Earth, their words to the ends of the world. Now my question
is this, is that, is the message that’s being conveyed just that God is the
creator and these guys are spectacular, or does the message that they are proclaiming
in terms of distance, and years, is that also a true message? We come back to this
thing, speed of light, how you measure the distance to the stars and so on. What
do you think?

Ross: Well, twice the psalmist says the heavens declare the righteousness
of God. So I would argue that the psalmists are trying to make the point that the
heavens declare not just a god exists but the God, the God of the Bible exists.
And I’ve written in my books if you look at the record of nature and universe,
you see that it must be a transcendent being, transcends ten space/time dimension,
matter, and energy. We can identify that this God is trillions of trillions of trillions
of times etc. more powerful than we humans beings in its capacity to design and
create.

I thought God was infinitely more powerful.

Ross: Likewise more intelligent, more knowledgeable, and I think
the real distinctive is that we can demonstrate from that record that God is caring
and loving. Now of all the gods of the religions of the world, which one transcends
ten space/time dimensions?

Where does it say this in the Bible?

Ross: Which one reveals himself as trillions and trillions and
trillions and trillions of times more creative, more powerful, more knowledgeable,
more intelligent, more caring and loving than human beings? You’re really
left with just the God of the Bible. Now my problem with a young Earth interpretation
is all that evidence is erased. The heavens do not declare the glory of God.

Nonsense. Nothing in the ‘young Earth interpretation’ says that any
evidence is erased. But notice that Ross is really making an appeal to pragmatism—never
mind what the Bible teaches, his main objection is that his big-bang-based ‘evidence’
collapses if we deny billions of years.

Moderator: What about this appearance of age, Kent?

Hovind: Well, Adam—how old was Adam when God made him?

Ross: Brand new.

Hovind: Did he look brand new?

Ross: He looked brand new.

Hovind: Did he look like a sperm or an egg, or a fertilized embryo,
or a full grown man?

Ross: Well, let me put it this way. You and I have liver spots
on our skin. In fact the teenagers in this audience have liver spots on their skin.
They’re not brand new when you examine them up close using medical methods.
But I believe that when God created Adam, yes he was tall, fully capable, fully
functional, but he was brand new, no liver spots, no chipped teeth, no gray hair,
no baldness, he was brand new. Cause when God creates, that’s how he creates,
he doesn’t create with the appearance of age, he never creates with the appearance
of age.

Hovind: That, that is the appearance of age, look at him, I mean
he’s old enough to walk, talk, get married first day.

Ross: You’re assuming he comes from a womb, the text tells
us he doesn’t come from the womb of a woman.

Hovind: I know.

Yes, exactly. This illustrates that all ‘scientific’ methods for trying
to work out ages depend on underlying assumptions about the past. The uniformitarians,
whom Ross follows uncritically, ignore a priori the past as stated in the true history
of the universe, the Bible—see this quote from Hutton,
the ‘Father of uniformitarianism’.

The article The Earth: How old does it look?, shows
that the Earth doesn’t ‘look old’ all by itself, but this appearance
is based on uniformitarian assumptions. With Biblical assumptions, the Earth ‘looks
young’ just as the Bible teaches, and there are many scientific indicators
to teach this. But in another sense, the Earth really is old—about
6000 years old! It’s only the incessant indoctrination in billions of years
that makes many people think that the enormous time span of many thousands of years
is ‘young’.

Ross: He’s specially created by God by the dust of the Earth.

Hovind: I understand. And Eve was made from Adam’s rib, not
his side like you said, it was just a rib is what the Bible says. But they were
full grown, fully mature human beings in a full grown garden, they didn’t
have to wait three or four years for the trees to produce fruits.

Ross: I don’t agree they were mature, I believe that both
of them were brand new—

Hovind: Could they speak?

Ross: God gave them that capacity.

Hovind: So they came pre-programmed from the hand of God, fully
formed, fully functional.

This is all a creationist means by ‘appearance of age’. Despite Ross’s
obfuscations, if we were to go back in time and see Adam and Eve on the sixth day,
for all practical purposes they would look like, say, 25-year-olds, although extraordinarily
youthful-looking.

Ross: They were fully functional, as a chicken or the egg, God
makes the chicken first.

Hovind: I agree, he makes the chicken, I agree. Now why can’t
he do that with the stars? What is your problem there?

Ross: Well, because the text doesn’t use the word bara
with respect to the stars. It does for Adam and Eve, but it doesn’t use that
word for the stars.

Hovind: Well, I showed you where it does. In chapter one, it says
God let us make man in our image, the next verse says God created man. It uses them
interchangeably, and there’s hundreds of examples.

Ross: I’m not agreeing that it’s interchangeable. I
believe it’s referring to two different characteristics of humanity. The spirit
within us is—

Hovind: See, that’s only to make it fit your theory, though.

Ross: Hold it. The spirit within us is brand new, never existed
before in the animal kingdom on Earth. It happened for the first time with Adam.
Now, there’s parts of us that are not brand new. We have physical bodies,
just like the other animals have physical bodies. Therefore the text doesn’t
use bara to refer to our physical capacity. It uses the word asah.
It still attributes to God the miraculous. God himself performed a miracle of taking
the dust of the Earth, which wasn’t brand new, it’s been around for
a while.

Where does Ross get this idea from? As explained before,
while bara and asah have different nuances, they are often used
interchangeably, so this invalidates Ross’s point.
Genesis 1:26–27 says ‘Let us make ( asah)
man in our image, … So God created ( bara) man in his own image
…’ There is nothing in the text that says that bara
refers to the spiritual and asahto the physical. Both are used of making
man in God’s image.

Guest: My question is about the canopy theory. You’ve been
critical, Dr Hovind, of Dr. Ross, because he makes a lot of use of 20th
century science, but I never hear young Earth creationists talk much about the origin
of canopy theory. As best I can determine, it was developed by a man named Isaac
Newton Vail, he was a Quaker, he was a self-taught geologist, I’m not sure
he was a Christian. He was an evolutionist. He believed the Earth was millions of
years old. And this 19th century discredited theory has been embraced
by young-Earth creationists. Aren’t you doing the very same thing that you
have criticized Dr. Ross for doing?

Hovind: Well, first of all, you accuse me of being against 20th
century science. That is simply not true. I love science. I’ve seen no scientific
evidence to go against this book. I see a lot of 20th century interpretations
of scientific facts that are contrary. But again, you’re confusing the interpretation
that somebody gives to the fact. Here’s Grand Canyon. How did it get there?
Some guy says billions of years, okay, now, you can’t make his interpretation
part of the fact that it’s there. All we know is it’s there. So I am
not against science, I love science, okay? I’ve not seen any scientific evidence
to contradict the young-Earth creationist model, an instantaneous creation, six
days, I’ve never seen any scientific evidence. I see evolutionary interpretations
that contradict that. And there’s no question, the Bible has a lot of conflict
with evolution. And I think the Bible has a lot of conflict with Hugh Ross’s
teachings. But there’s no conflict between science and the Bible.

Ross: How do you explain the existence of stars in a young Earth
interpretation?

Notice this is not, ‘how do you explain how stars can be seen’, but
just how they exist. As shown, Ross believes that stars only arose after the big
bang and stellar evolution, and rejects the idea that God made them supernaturally
on Day 4.

Hovind: Well, I did, now let me finish this question here. Critical
of science. As far as the canopy theory, I don’t know who invented it, I’ve
never heard of this guy you mentioned.

Guest: (voice fades in): …have his book, and I’ll
be happy to give it to you, this is a reprint of his book.

Hovind: Well, that’s fine. The fact is, I read the Bible
and I see, and I look at science and I see several interesting things. Insects are
found in the fossil record that are huge. Insects breathe through their skin. There’s
a real problem as an insect gets larger, it breathes through spiracles in its skin.
As you increase the size of an insect, the surface area to volume ratio changes
radically, and you have a problem where it can’t get enough oxygen. And yet
we find dragonflies, we found one in Italy here recently with a fifty-inch wingspan.
Well, a fifty-inch dragonfly couldn’t possibly fly today. Something was different.
Two-foot grasshopper fossils are found. Eighteen-inch cockroach fossils. In Germany
last summer, or this summer they found an eight-and-a-half-foot centipede fossil.
Something was different on this planet, because insects today cannot get that size
because of the surface area to volume ratio problem. They just don’t have
enough skin to absorb the oxygen they need. Plus the flight, you know, pterodactyls
are found with fifty-foot wingspan, they couldn’t fly today.

I’ve heard about this alleged inability to fly today, but it’s heterodox
and I advise creationists not to use this.

Moderator: Refresh our memory then, what are you saying that the
text says?

Ross: Well, I believe that the text is saying that there was a
fully functional water cycle from the second creation day onward. I mean as I look
at Genesis two I see two Hebrew words, ed-matar, rain and mist, as you look at the
lexical definitions, it’s simply a matter of degree. One’s referring
to bigger liquid drops of water, one’s referring to smaller liquid drops of
water, …

Despite Ross’s blurring of the meanings of rain and mist, the point of this
passage is to contrast them.

Ross: … and as a geologist friend of mine point out, we
have fossil evidence of falling raindrops in shale and sandstone rocks that go back
before 10 million years. Rain was here.

How does he know that the ‘rocks that go back before 10 million years’?
The text clearly says there was no rain before man was created.

Ross: And would also fit the whole idea of the covenant theology.
When God uses something to sign one of his covenants, he always picks something
familiar within the environment to sign that with, like water baptism or food and
wine, and therefore there must have been rain and rainbows before the flood for
God to use that as a covenant signature.

I won’t say ‘must’, but I agree that God probably did as Ross
said here, and there is nothing in the text to rule it out.

Moderator: Question.

Guest: Okay. This is directed to Dr Ross. But first, for Dr Hovind,
I have studied Hebrew, and Dr Ross does an admirable job, he’s done his homework,
…

If this guy thinks Ross ‘does an admirable job’ with Hebrew, then this
guy must have obtained his Hebrew qualifications, if any, from a matzah packet.

Guest: … we’ve talked personally about some of these
things, and yet this is directed because we do have some differences. And so Dr
Ross, with, in relation to the word yom used in the Old Testament, 359 times it
is linked with a number, numerical index. All but a few times, like Hosea 6:2, it
refers to a literal 24-hour solar day.

Ross: Sure.

Hosea 6:2 ‘After two days he will revive us; on the
third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence’
is no exception. This verse exhibits a particular kind of Semitic poetic
parallelism of the form X / X + 1 (cf.
Job 5:19;
Proverbs 6:16;
30:15,18;
Amos 1:3, 6, 9). So it must be interpreted according to the
specific context, so that ‘two days’ and ‘three days’ mean
that God’s healing of the broken Israel, promised in the previous verse,
will occur in a short time. In fact, Ross’s ‘exception’ reinforces
the literal day interpretation, because if these days were millions of
years long, the restoration would not exactly be quick.

Guest: So, the evidence seems to support a 24-hour day. How would
you deal with this?

Ross: Well, how I’d deal with it is to make the point that
those 300+ references that you’ve found are in the context of human history,
whereas what you’ve got in Hosea chapter 6 is a prophetic reference using
the word day, what you have in Genesis one is a reference towards the natural creation.
It’s a different context. The other references are referring to human history.
So you have to examine the context to see which way you should take one of the three
definitions.

This is just special pleading to ignore those 300+ references. God wrote the Bible
to instruct us (2
Tim. 3:15–17), so those references should tell us what He meant in
Genesis 1. If the days in Genesis 1 was a unique case contrary to other uses of
‘day’ in similar context, then the door is open to ‘interpret’
anything else one doesn’t like as a ‘unique case’ too. And as
said, God goes out of His way to assure us that the creation week was the same duration
as the working week in
Exodus 20:8–11.

Guest: In doing that, there is very good evidence that it is a
24-hour period. Now you know as we’ve talked that I’m really open to
looking at all the options. I want to know the truth, a lot of people listening
want to know what is really the case. And you have presented some very good evidence,
and we need to spend time sifting through, pulling these things together, and I
think, I know for me, yom is still a problem. And I think for a lot of other people.
What would you say that we need to do in seeking truth or good evidence in this
area?

Ross: Well, you know I like problems, I like
disagreements, cause it’s a wonderful way to learn. I mean every time God
takes a doubt away from me he gives me three new ones I didn’t know I had
in the first place. I think that’s how God teaches us.

Where in the Bible does it say that God gives doubt?
James 1:5 says that God gives wisdom to those who ask. Ross sounds
more like ‘always learning and never able to come to the
knowledge of the truth’ (2
Timothy 3:7).

Ross: What I would recommend, we have to stop using the charge
of heresy or heretic, cause all that does is raise fear, and it shuts down communication.
We need to open the communication up. If people will dialog without these charges
of heresy or you’re not a Christian or you’re leading people astray,
I think we can get this settled. All it takes is to get people to talk, in a peaceable
environment, where they accept one another’s Christian testimony.

So, will Ross withdraw his nasty comparison of young-Earth creationists with some
heretics that the Apostle Paul anathematized in the book of Galatians:14

Ross: ‘Much as circumcision divided the first-century church,
I see the creation date issue dividing the church of this century. As circumcision
distorted the Gospel and hampered evangelism, so, too, does young-Earth creationism.

Hovind: One comment I would make, in Hosea chapter 6, when it talks
about the day of the Lord, that may be a literal 24-hour day. There is going to
be a day when he comes and redeems this world, so take the 300 references where
it’s clearly a 24-hour day, and say we have one where it’s questionable—that
one still could be a 24-hour day—and then to build a whole doctrine based
on that one questionable verse, I think that’s real thin ice to be skating
on.

Ross: Well, if you’ve only got one passage in the Bible where
numbered days refer to natural creation, that establishes an entirely different
context. That would give me the basis for an exception.

Hovind provided a good rule of thumb—it makes more sense to use 300+ clear
passages than one doubtful one, which actually reinforces the 300+ when interpreted
properly anyway!

Moderator: No, that’s because of research, that, I mean,
that would be like saying that these fellows that we’ve mentioned that are
leading our evangelical seminaries that somehow they’ve been swayed by the
outside world. And I’m saying those are some of the strongest Christians I
know that called me into obedience to the text. So the fact is I think we can disagree,
but to say that they’re not looking at all the records, I just don’t
think you can do that.

Hovind: No, I don’t think you’re a heretic because
you don’t think the days are six days. I think if you have death before sin,
now you’ve crossed over the line where that’s a heretical doctrine.
And the Bible says there’s gonna be heresies, and somebody’s obviously
wrong. We can’t both be right. I think we should discuss and I’m thrilled
to be here, I could go all night with this. But I think I’m gonna stick with
what the scripture plainly teaches, it’s just—

Ross: So you’re claiming Gleason Archer’s
a heretic.

Hovind: I don’t know. Never met him. I don’t care what
anybody believes, I care what does the Scripture say. I can read it, and I can understand
it, and I think the average person can too.

I’m pretty sure Archer’s no heretic—his book Encyclopedia of Bible
Difficulties15 is an outstanding
defence of Biblical inerrancy. Nor do I think that Ankerberg is a heretic—he
too has produced many fine apologetics resources on a number of topics. But they
are inconsistent in their interpretation of Genesis, while fortunately they both
correctly interpret passages about the Trinity, Biblical inerrancy, the Atonement
and Resurrection of Christ. However, people will fall into outright heresy if the
passages about the death and Resurrection of the Last Adam are ‘interpreted’
in the same way as those in Genesis about the sin of the First Adam that brought
death into the world, which was the reason Christ came in the first place (1 Cor. 15). People
like Charles Templeton slid down this very slippery slide
to unbelief.

Ross: Can’t you understand how that just closes down discussion
when you say, "Hey, if you believe in long creation days you’re a heretic
and should be rejected from the church"?

Hovind: I didn’t say that, I said if you believe there’s
death before sin, now that doctrine I would put in the category of heresy. Believing
the days are long—

Ross: But you can’t disconnect that from long creation days.

No, not consistently, but some people are Christians by virtue of their inconsistency—i.e.
they still believe in Christ’s atoning death, burial and Resurrection but
fail to see the conflict with a non-literal Genesis.

Ross: Well, I just finished writing a book with five other scholars
called the Genesis Debate, framework hypothesis, young Earth, and day-age.
And what’s fascinating to me is we took very different positions on the Sabbath.
The framework people view that the seventh day is eternal, the young Earth creationists
said it’s 24 hours, we took the point of view that it was a long but finite
period of time that ends with the beginning of the new creation.

Moderator: Why? Tell us why.

Ross: Okay, the text. And this is where we were making progress
in the debate. You know the editor was quite pleased, because he says you know there’s
a lot more clarity in the scripture on the length of the seventh day than …

However, note that CMI, although one of the leading organizations defending the
‘literal day’ view, was not consulted; while Ross, one of the most prominent
‘day agers’ was invited to defend his view (same of course goes for
this Ankerberg Show debate). We have yet to see the book, but plan a review in the
Technical
Journal in 2001 [Now Journal of Creation. [The review can
be found here
(PDF).]

Moderator: Well, let me, you know, the argument that yôm
never means anything in the Bible but a literal 24 hours is completely untenable
in the light of scriptural usage elsewhere. That’s by our two leading evangelical
scholars.

Hovind: I have never said—I have never said that yôm
always means a 24-hour day.

Indeed he has not, and neither has any other creationist. It would be nice if the
moderator would keep silently impartial rather than knock down straw men.

Hovind: When it’s put with the modifiers evening, morning,
the first day, the second day, then it always means a 24-hour day. So what passage
of Scripture, Hugh, do you have, where it uses evening and morning—I mean,
Jesus was in the grave for three days. How long was he in the grave?

Ross: Okay, in the book of Daniel we
have numbered days that are not 24 hours. (?) with evenings and morning. In the
book of Hosea—

Hovind: Wait a minute, wait a minute, explain that. What’s
the one in Daniel you’re talking about here?

Ross: Well, okay, I think it’s chapter ten.

I have no idea what Ross is dreaming about here. Numbered day/days are mentioned
three times in Daniel 10—all of which clearly refer to 24-hr days:
v. 4: ‘On the 24thday of the
first month …’,
v. 12: ‘… Since the first day
that you set your mind to gain understanding …’,
v.13:
‘But the prince of the Persian kingdom resisted me twenty-one
days.’

Ross: But you can check our website, we’ve got an article
written by one of our scholars on what Daniel says about the evenings and mornings.

Oh, he’s talking about Daniel 8, not
10; and an article by an engineer called Dr Otto Helweg. Both this article and refutations
by Drs David Shackleford and David Fouts were published in
[Journal of Creation, formerly] CEN Technical Journal (TJ)11(3):299–308,
1997. Helweg’s case was built on
Daniel 8:26: ‘The vision of evenings and mornings …’
supposedly not referring to literal days, because the original Hebrew words erev
and boqer are in the singular yet the time frame is longer than 24 hours.

However, the OT never uses plural form ( erev
does occur in the dual 11 times and in every case is rendered as ‘twilight’)!
The English translators correctly render them as plurals when they are modified
by a numerical adjective. The context should make this clear: What vision? Obviously
the one referred to most recently, i.e.Dan.
8:1–14, which concludes with ‘It will take 2,300
evenings and mornings; then the sanctuary will be reconsecrated.’
Here also, the singulars are used, but must obviously be plural in function because
there are 2,300 of them—2,300 is definitely a numerical adjective! And these
must be literal days, so this reinforces our point. None other than Ross and Ankerberg’s
authority, Gleason Archer, says they must be either 2300 24-hr days, or the 2300
comprises 1,150 evenings and 1,150 mornings meaning only 1,150 days, but not long
ages!16

In Genesis 1, the evening and morning are combined with an ordinal, so they refer
to only one 24-hr day at a time.

Guest: In comparison, I have a real easy question. Does the Bible
teach that there was a time that the Earth was packed in ice or the ice age theory?
And if so, did it occur in chapter one of Genesis between verses one and two?

Ross: The only passages I’m aware of are in the books of
the Psalms and the Proverbs, there’s one in Job as well, which makes the point
that God controls the quantity of snow, frost, and ice for the benefit of all life.
And you know as a physicist I can tell you that you do need this regular cycling
of water through all three states. What makes life possible on planet Earth is not
just that we’ve got liquid water, but that we have a huge quantity of frozen
water, liquid water, and water vapour, and you need these to be cycling in order
for particularly advanced life to be possible on planet Earth. So that’s the
most direct reference I could find in the Bible for an ice age, but I wouldn’t
say it’s proof of an ice age. It’s simply proof that there are these
large quantities of frozen water that do cycle through our environment.

Hovind: Right. I don’t think I would disagree with what he
said there. That still would have nothing to do with when this happened. I think
you’ll find most young Earth creationists would fall into two camps of what
the ice age. Some would say—I happen to be in the camp that the ice age was
probably what caused the flood. Others would say the flood caused the ice age. You
know, minor difference. We’ve got a whole videotape, we call it the Hovind
theory so nobody else gets blamed for it, about how the ice age probably was caused
by a meteor strike.

I’m glad we won’t be blamed for it. See the more credible Oard theory,
that the Ice Age is an aftermath of the Flood, explained in the booklet and Q&A
pages (above right).

…

Moderator: All right, guys, I just want to say thank you for all
that you’ve shared with us, and my hope is that those of you that are watching,
that you will let this material be that which will motive you to dig into the scripture,
and hopefully it’s turned on the lights in your mind as to the relationship
of scripture and science and that this will increase your faith in the God of the
Bible. So guys again, I want to say thank you for being here and for all that you’ve
done, and for those of you that have listened.

Keil, C.F. and Delitzsch, F., Commentaries on the Old Testament,
n.d., original German in the 19 th century, English translation published
by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, The Pentateuch, 1: 67.
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